Felipe Alfau - Chromos

I could hear no more, I was looking about me in the meek man’s mind:

He was back at his exercise of creating grandiose situations of self-denial. In this one he was a very good man, a very virtuous man, but being Spanish, it was not as simple as that. His virtue must be kept secret so that he might not even test that honor. He must study all his good actions with a severe and critical eye, lest he catch himself doing something good to derive self-satisfaction. This would rob goodness of all its purity. He remembered the night when he had met a very old lady on Sixth Avenue lugging a heavy suitcase in the rain. He offered to carry it for her and she let him do so gratefully, and he carried the case for two blocks to her dingy apartment. She thanked him profusely and asked him to step in and have some coffee, but he suddenly felt ashamed of himself. He knew that he had done it in order to derive some satisfaction out of his good deed, to atone, that was it, to atone, but he did not know for what. He felt it was a smug gesture, a contemptible action, and hated himself for it. He declined the invitation and rushed away in blind shame.

All the rest of that night he was beset by confusing thoughts and contradictory emotions. God! Could one not even do one good deed without repentance? This was becoming involved to the point of insanity. What mattered what satisfaction one derived from one’s good actions if they benefited someone? Was not that the purpose of virtue? But something told him that this was not so, that virtue must remain purer than this. It was complicated to the utmost and disconcerting and for a dangerous moment almost forced him to the conclusion that the true goodness should be to sin, in order to deprive oneself from what is the greatest joy of the good man: the virtuous deed. Then where was the salvation? In sinning, or in doing good? And salvation could not be the reason for virtue, without destroying its purity.

This was too much. One could consider the matter for an eternity when after all there were but two choices. It reminded him of the game he played as a boy with a friend. It consisted of holding two small pebbles. If the two pebbles were in one hand, this was called odd. If one pebble was held in each hand, it was called even. He held his hands behind and then in front before his friend and if the friend guessed right, it was his turn to hold the pebbles.

Well, assuming he held one in each hand and the other boy said odd, then he would reason something like this: He will think that I think he will call even this time and that I will hold the two pebbles in one hand in order to fool him and so he will call odd again; so, let us carry the reasoning a little further. He will think that I think that he thinks that I think— It was maddening. If the game itself was nothing, its implications of futility were frightening because, after all, there were but two possibilities. This was like the result of Spanish involved thinking that had burned the brains of Don Quixote. It was the super-Calderónianism of which Don Pedro spoke. He recalled the Moor speaking once along similar lines. He had mentioned a mathematical series that ran plus m , minus m , plus m , minus m — Was it converging, or diverging? He did not recall, but what did one get at the end, m or nothing?

These divagations were getting him nowhere and he wanted to enjoy his situation. He went back to the original proposition: that Spanish or not, simple or Calderónian, odds or even, he was a very good and virtuous man who had always managed to hide modestly all his virtues and good deeds and — he was now in a hurry to get away from this rut and on with his business — he died one day and naturally went straight to heaven. And here is where the problem sprang afresh in all its dramatism:

He was in heaven but he was not happy. This could only happen to a Spaniard. He was very unhappy thinking of all the souls in hell. He could not enjoy his eternal glory knowing that so many suffered eternally. His virtue, his love for his fellow men, had not stopped with his death. These were theological problems worth investigating. It had occurred to him that good people, when they died and went to heaven, behaved rather selfishly and that anyone who could enjoy celestial graces with such a disregard for the sufferings of others could not possibly deserve eternal salvation. But then, what was the solution, if other people insisted on being bad? Of course, the answer was that one should not be good in order to go to heaven, in fact, that a truly good man should refuse to stay there after arriving. The lines of the famous mystic poem went through his head:

My Lord, I am not moved to love you by the heaven you have promised, Nor am I moved to fear you because of the hell by all so dreaded.

Only a Spaniard could have written that. It posed the whole theological question with remarkable sentimental clarity. He decided to lay the problem in the lap of his Creator and directly went to Him. Only a Spaniard could thus complicate the existence of God.

“My Lord,” he said, “I have a problem which I would discuss with You.”

The Lord answered: “Yes, My son. For some time I have noticed you brooding and distracted, going about without taking part in the celestial general happiness, and it grieves Me, because you were brought here to enjoy eternal glory. Unburden your soul, My son, since that is all you have now.”

“My Lord, I am not happy here and I will never be happy so long as I know that there are so many other men burning forever in hell. To me, this is the height of hard-faced selfishness, to be enjoying myself here while numberless souls are in eternal torture. To be a noble soul the situation is intolerable.” He checked himself respectfully but it seems that the Lord was listening without any intention of interrupting and he proceeded:

“I have a request to make and if You grant it, my gratitude will be greater and more lasting than the one I feel at having been admitted here.” This was Spanish and of the Attic culteranismo school, matching infinity with transfinity and recalled something he had heard Don Pedro say about the paradoxes of the infinite. “It is axiomatic that it is better for any number of guilty to go unpunished than for one single innocent to be punished unjustly and my proposition is this: that I be banished to hell and that all those who occupy it now or may go there in the future be moved to heaven, we might say at my expense and in memory of my beloved Spain. Knowing this, I shall be happier in hell than I could ever be in heaven.”

The Lord made certain that he had finished and then said: “You know? You have a great deal of arrogance and you are almost trying to give Me a lesson and go the limit of virtue one better. The national system, I suppose— made you that way of course — wanted to have someone capable of understanding and feeling greatness. One is not a fool and One can appreciate a castizo, but you don’t know what it’s all about. You know? You flatter yourself. Do you think that your soul is worth all the souls in hell, present and future?” The Lord dismissed an interruption: “If you have that great capacity for self-denial, would not this be reaffirming yourself to the utmost, would not this be basking shamelessly in universal acknowledgment and admiration and everlasting gratitude?”

“But I wanted this to remain a secret between us two.”

“Never mind. My knowing it is worth more than for the whole world to know it. Where is your modesty? How many condemned souls do you think your soul is worth? One million, one hundred, three, one, or none?”

And then the Lord knew human greatness and did no longer regret having created man, because this one before Him averted his eyes and answered in the best Spanish tradition: