Felipe Alfau - Chromos

The last remarks of the Moor referred to another altercation he had had some time before with the same actor. It was at a play in the Spanish Theater. Lunarito and Bejarano had been lured to dance during the intermissions, having been given to understand that the performance was for some Spanish charity, and Lunarito had gone even further and acted a part in the play. It was a classical Spanish play in which the part of the gallant is always played by a woman, and Lunarito looked very engaging in her tights.

At the time, our actor had developed an overdramatized crush on Lunarito, opposite whom he had played that night. Incensed by the occasion, the applause, no doubt meant for Lunarito’s legs rather than for his acting, and emboldened by the masterful role he had concluded, he went up to Lunarito’s dressing room ready for an extra scene, some kind of a rousing encore that would win her favor. There he met the Moor, who had come to fetch Lunarito and Bejarano and take them back to the nightclub where they were appearing with his band in a late show. It was easy to become entangled in words where the Moor was concerned and one word led to another and eventually to a fight in which the Moor cruelly belabored the ill-protected bones of the actor with his proverbial shillelagh.

Again the music of Cáceres came to deliver me from these considerations and Garcia was pulling me out of my seat. I followed him gladly toward the patio, near which everyone was again collecting. There had been general demand for La Colombina and Pinto to dance, with the aroused audience overlooking their well-known rivalry and overruling their objections that they had never danced together. The Moor was cleverer. He taunted and insinuated, conceded, and in the end it was he and not the others who broke down the resistance. Perhaps, too, the presence of Cáceres had to do with it. His invitation and condescension to play was tantamount to a command. He enjoyed unrivaled prestige among his people.

This was not to be missed, these two dancing together in these auspicious and informal circumstances. It was something that had never happened before and would probably never happen again. The arrogant manner in which Pinto yielded and the demure docility of La Colombina. He stood looking into her with his very cold eyes and then his face softened into a crooked and sad and inviting smile that dissipated all professional jealousies, spread to both and lowered her eyes, that ran down like a histrionic mantle of regal magnanimity, welcoming her into its folds and sweeping both into the patio.

It was midafternoon and the sun was red gold on the dance. Garcia and I had squeezed nearest the entrance to the patio where we had a full view. Garcia recited in whispers at my ear:

“The dancers were shadows and their shadows were shadows of shadows—”

And so it was. No rattle of castanets or trigger heels here. No furious contortions or defiant expressions. Where previously the two friends had danced like enemies bent upon mutual destruction, the two rivals danced like friends committed to mutual interpretation. They moved about in silence like ghosts. One had been all flesh and reality; this was all soul and fantasy; It was the height of stylization — nothing to distract from the purity of the music but absolute plasticity to be fashioned by it, not accentuating but becoming a reflection of its rhythm, caught and frozen into the perfect tableau.

Although the dance itself was a typical Spanish dance, which therefore they could perform together for the first time without difficulty, they lifted it to the category of a symbolism undreamed of by anyone without their understanding of movement. Their insight into form, their silent dancing, did not stress the tempo but the phrase, and seeing them sway, diverge and converge in silence, like two shadows abandoning and recapturing their shadows, one realized that this was the ultimate in motion with a meaning: the gesture.

From where I was, I could see on the other side of the semicircle of people the face of Fulano, now and then blotted out by a shoulder or a projecting head and reappearing under somebody’s arm. His thoughts, although silent like the dancers and also motivated by the same music, clashed at times in unplanned syncopation. It was disturbing, these short flashes of someone else’s mind:

Out of place here and yet he was glad for this opportunity to see all this and it was a good substitute for his frustrated desires to return to Spain, but not the Spain where he had lived in his early youth, but the one he had imagined then and imagined since and which had grown in his mind into a great artificial, international stereotype, fed on the things he knew most foreigners thought of his land. But that Spain, had it existed, he had never known. He came from another section, not from that southern section where all this color and gaiety was supposed to exist, nor from any place with popular history or tradition, but simply from a place which might have been anywhere, and he had come to New York and waited all these years to see the Spain he had imagined. It was a very short substitute and he was out of place—

His face disappeared behind someone. They danced with subhuman indifference to each other and complete dedication to the common task, like two cogwheels, and with the same implacable beauty of precision; not actors but dancers, their faces like masks, their bodies like words building eloquently the syntax of their choreography.

There were his eyes:

The commonplace office near Hanover Square — import and export, but he only an employee, inconsequential in this world of international barter, nothing like that other importer who had brought the shawls. They had met here on equal terms and the other man had assumed that he was something in the business world and there had even been a suggestion about getting together sometime. Was he not here with the celebrities, brought by Don Pedro Guzman, the famous bandleader? Yes; through the careless generosity of Don Pedro, the disorderly and extrasocial Irish Moor who went about like a rushing junk wagon, dropping favors, alms, things for which one might or might not have any use—

And it was gone. The structure of the dance developed. It was like a series of stills in rapid succession from picture to picture, creating the illusion of smooth motion, almost cinematographic, but if it had been recorded on film, one could have considered any one of the pictures as a finished position. No awkward position could have been found in passing from one telling attitude to another. Every intermediary step would have been found completely balanced in form and a thing of beauty. Not only the structure, but the way it was built, was perfect.

The face was between two shoulders that were not his own and he was not torturing himself as usual, but appraising with certain calm:

Why this nostalgia about a country he scarcely remembered? Why not nostalgia about this other country where he had been so long? About his youth in this country? But he did have that at times and even now at this moment and, although in these surroundings Spain had gone to his head, there was a vague desire to slip out, to leave and hurry, run back to his own room where he could be alone with his own memories of his own Spain and not the one he made believe he shared with all these luckier people. They had not been like him, separated from their past, feeding their personality on their own identity. Half of them just arrived, the other half visited the old country frequently. They did not remember his Spain and he did not know theirs, and the ones who might have remembered had their memories obliterated by seeing the place change gradually and grow with them, and why should they pick that one particular epoch more than any other to remember, to see it, to endure the poignant sweetness of its isolated clarity? He resented them. He envied them and they were his brothers, his own more fortunate brothers—