Felipe Alfau - Chromos

I looked around carefully, keeping my vigilant shadow unmolested behind and above me, like a cobra. The stains and cracks on the walls became those of bare stone, creating confusing and bizarre designs like those of a sarcophagus. Some old calendar chromos still clung to them: one showing a man with calañes and short jacket serenading a young lady with high comb and very black, mournful eyes at a window with bars and profusely surrounded by flowers; another was a chapel with a recumbent bullfighter dying on a couch with a beshawled woman, her head buried in his bloody chest and all around the austere, stoic, classical countenances of the loyal members of his cuadrilla and a tearful old lady staring her reproach at the altar and the eternal old priest withholding discreetly his understanding and faith and soothing blessing, but attentive to the duties of his office in performing the last rites; chromos that had once been brilliantly bursting with color and drama, but were now faded and desecrated by fly stains; chromos in disrepute.

The bookcase with its books was still at the far wall, the only piece of furniture left in that room once abandoned in the great divide of life. I reached for one of the books, felt the thick dust on it and pulled. A cockroach crawled over my hand and I let go of the book. It fell on the floor where it lay open and I fancied I saw more bugs run out of it in all directions. They ran up the walls, over and under the chromos which in the uncertain light of the match seemed to oscillate painfully, to grow dolefully animated and gather the deceptive depth of a reverie, reaching for the cracks, the shadows in the walls as if to pull them like a shroud over their shame, to resume their disturbed sleep, and as the walls seemed to recede, the shadows running through them like waves, merged with the pictures to form a confused tapestry depicting people and scenes that came to life, but more like things remembered or imagined, because the walls were no longer there.

“You must let me tell you about this family in Spain,” Garcia said. “It is like a novel and for that matter, I am making one of it. It could only have happened in Spain.”

I thought that many people are always saying that a thing could only happen in a certain place. Why? and I told him so.

He said that I had not heard the story yet, but he had told me several times about this family. “Well, possibly I have, but superficially. I would like to tell you more in detail and discuss the novel I expect to make out of it with you. I have all the data which I obtained from several people, but mostly from my mother. She knew them very intimately. Are you doing anything this afternoon?”

I had seen this coming for some time and I thought that I might as well get it over with. Garcia’s persistent enthusiasm about belles lettres is more that of a Latin American than a Spaniard. We were at the café El Telescopio where we had lunched together and were now facing that vacuous panorama to which most of my countrymen are committed by traditional respectful consent and which extends indefinitely after every meal, connecting it effortlessly with the next. So, I reached for my bottle, took a good swallow and resigned myself to listen.

But first, and to ape Garcia, you must let me tell you about El Telescopio which, as he would contend, could only happen in New York.

I cannot remember the real name of the place, but it was a remarkable café. There were no wineglasses in sight at El Telescopio and everybody drank out of the bottle — a tradition that was started by a fantastic habitué, a certain Don Pedro, known to most of us as the Moor, considered an authority in anything typically Spanish. He had stated sententiously that the true Spaniard would drink manzanilla from cañitas, sherry from chatos, but regular wine only from the bottle, leaving the wineskin for picnics and ordinary wine, but glasses, never.

Now, I wouldn’t put it past him to have made the whole thing up out of his own head, because this fellow could invent traditions out of thin air to suit his fancy or perhaps his lazy thirst as in this case. I have questioned other Spaniards on the subject and some have said that they had never given the matter a thought but that now that they thought of it. Others have denied it flatly and called it a manifestation of distorted patriotism, Españolism, or plain nonsense and the matter stands there, but the result is that the thing caught and at El Telescopio all those Spaniards who insist on living in Spain wherever they are sat from morning to night drinking wine out of bottles and when they leaned back to drink, sighting their interlocutor along the label or squinting into the green depths to search for a last drop, they certainly looked like some tipsy astronomer aiming a wobbly telescope at the stars too distant to matter in one’s condition of libating bliss. When they did this in the summer, sitting by the open windows or on the patio, the effect was perfect Therefore the nickname of El Telescopio with which our same authority on the typical had baptized it

This café was located on Cherry Street where there were others like it, although not quite as big, as popular or offering such a representative cross section of all classes of my people. It gathered laborers, businessmen in the import and export lines, nightclub entertainers in moments of repentance at their disloyal success, plain expatriates and even derelicts from the not-too-distant Bowery in extraordinary moments of self-respecting affluence, all of whom, no matter how different otherwise, had two things in common: their language and the phenomenal respect which every

Spaniard has for his food and his wine, and El Telescopio made good on both scores.

It had a large dining room that developed into an ample bar with two billiard tables and on the other side spread onto a yard with an awning for summer dining. But what made El Telescopio authentic is that it was not decorated in the so-called Spanish style. True, there were posters, some imported, advertising bullfights in Madrid or Sevilla that couldn’t do one any good here, and others domestic, advertising some Spanish film or play in some theater usually in Harlem — I mean, the one in Manhattan. It was in the yard that Garcia and I were sitting.

Through the open windows and door came the sound of voices in the bar punctuated by the knocking of the billiard balls, and there was also a radio turned to a Spanish program whose announcer for once did not have that punctiliously exasperating and forced intonation which is as tedious as an American putting on a British accent.

Oh yes, everything was quite Spanish; the setting just right to make one forget that one was in New York, and Garcia had that look in his eye and those papers in his hand. He regarded his semi-empty bottle, called for two more and then emptied what was left at one draft.

The thing was upon me:

A summer in the early 1870s, Mariano Sandoval came from Jauja to Madrid. He was accompanied by his wife Rosario and their two children, Fernando about ten and Julieta about five. They brought with them a lanky young man of eighteen or nineteen years of age, with faded clothes and complexion: Ledesma.

Señor Sandoval came to Madrid with as much resolution as transportation permitted in those days. That trip meant to him a great deal and Madrid should be, at least for that reason, the place to describe here. However, as the average reader may be considered somewhat acquainted with that capital, a word or two about Jauja will be more adequate at this point, so that the reader will form an idea of the place these people he has just met came from.

Jauja. Houses built on sloping grounds. There is a persistent recollection of buildings some three or four stories high in front, their sides invariably slashed diagonally by a hilly street and, in the back, roofs fading into the stormy ground.