Felipe Alfau - Chromos

It is for this reason very likely that a Spaniard, no matter how musical, cannot listen to his music critically and consider it simply as music. With him it is involved with traditional recollections which transcend the individual and constitute an inherited memory, creating a response which, more than personal, is racial and atavistic. Again I am drawing on the surplus stock of the Moor.

And there are some tunes and compositions, to be specific, that are particularly dear to us because of their felicity in portraying our impressions while we are there and our memories when we are away, which makes them more representative than any national anthem could be. It was one of these that Cáceres was playing, one called “Sevilla.”

To play a thing so well known, and a transcription at that, requires someone of the stature of Cáceres, but in this case one could say that the transcription followed the original only by the merest chronological accident and that it is in the guitar that this composition achieves full realization. Much Spanish music implies the guitar and this was never so patent as in this instance. As Don Pedro exclaimed with purple face and yelling himself hoarse when Cáceres was finished, this was written, intentionally or not, for the guitar and it is sacrilegious to play it otherwise and no one has heard it until he has heard it thus played.

“Viva!” and “Bravo!” he groaned with ferocity into his own chest, like a dog shaking a rag doll. Like him, everything had become intensified with that music and even the sun in the yard was more red gold: “This is the culmination of the dance. Alone, with his guitar, without dancers or props, he has given us more dance than La Colombina, Pinto, Lunarito and Bejarano.” He pointed at them with an indelicacy, he felt instinctively, that was excusable in a burst of philharmonic patriotism: “He has fed you soup with a sling, my dears, that’s all. This was not this dance or that one, but the dance of a whole country, physically and spiritually, the soul of a nation dancing.” He finished with the shameless cliché and with so vehement a manner and suggestion of mockery that it conveyed accurately that he was on the road back and with full authority and complete justification to use the abused logotype.

Again the thick lenses. He was in full view across from me and he looked sad, probably not because of Don Pedro’s phrase but on his own:

In the dark chamber of his mind was reflected the sunny yard, but it was a chromo of a legendary patio in Andalucia. Majos dressed in short jacket with calañés and fringed leggings; some in colorful bullfighters’ costumes and manolas with shawls and mantillas, high combs and full skirts and guitars and castanets and kegs of manzanilla, flowers on women’s heads and in men’s teeth and everywhere and bright sun as only it can shine in one’s imagination. He had never been to Sevilla.

“Ay Sevilla de mi alma!” came inevitably from Lunarito accompanied by an acquiescent chorus.

Knowing that she had really been there only made him feel worse. He was Spanish also and felt entitled to as much regret as the others. Sevilla was not only a town. It spread out to all of Spain as an invented symbol of a desirable way of life, of a dreamed way of being, but he had never been to the real Sevilla. Even this had been denied him. He would have wanted to say something about Sevilla or Madrid, or anything acknowledged as Spanish, but he would have felt like an imposter. If he had uttered a set phrase, he would have been a traitor to himself. If he had uttered a word with fresh meaning, he would have been a traitor to his people.

But the chromo persisted. It had faded somewhat under the veil of his more abstract considerations, but now it came back as bright and there were a burro erupting with madronos and two more figures added to it. One was a dashing soldier, complete with mustache, sideburns, epaulets and shiny boots. The other a rosy-cheeked and jovial priest inspecting the divertissements, and behind, like diffuse clouds to animate an otherwise limpid blue sky, the colossal inescapable shadows of Don Quixote, Columbus and the Gran Capitán. This was too much. It was grotesque and the very picture pointed out a way to escape the emotional by running into the critical and avoid this foreign infection of his fancy weakened by so many years abroad, by thinking more like a Spaniard, which at least he was by birth and right. He considered that while his countrymen have been depicted as flashingly bemustached, the members of the two most significant callings in Spain, priests and bullfighters, were clean-shaven, with the irrelevant consideration that while one boasts the coleta, the other bears the tonsure— His thoughts scattered.

The Moor was completely carried away. With arms upraised, one hand holding the shillelagh as a scepter giving authority to this raptus patriotic, the other snapping fingers with surprising loudness, he tore off into peteneras contriving to make his lameness an added contribution which made his contortions more flamencas:

“You see?” he rattled. “No need to kick your feet. Everything can be done right on a tile. Spanish dancing is all positional.” And he was good. Standing almost on the same spot, he created the impression of the Spanish dance, probably more by leaving something to imagination: “Give me more, Cáceres, more!”

And Cáceres gave. With syncopations and counter-syncopations, with his heel beating like a common tavern guitarist, they put on a rousing show.

“Come on, Cáceres! We are feeding these dancers soup with a sling— And speaking of soup, I want food, I need fuel. Gaudeamus!” and panting, he led the way back to the tables. Like one loaded with armfuls of commentaries, he went back to his seat, dropping many on his way, and fell on a chair exhausted with enthusiasm, dumping the whole load on the table like a cataract, drowning everybody around it.

To observe this man in talk and action was amazing. His constant gestures that blended into one another smoothly like those of a deaf-mute. His manipulation, his prestidigitation with bottle, glass, shillelagh and cigarette, shifting from hand to hand, leaving always one, sometimes both free to mold his speech, to emphasize or subdue the idea. Out came a sentence and a hand or two close on its heels to shove it along or hold it back, to pat it or spank it or roll it between skillful palms until it emerged balanced, rotating or bouncing on fingertips, or to help it float in midair with glass underneath or suction it with hand above to suddenly squash it against tabletop. To spring and catch it on the wing, palm it; now you see it, now you don’t, and make it dissolve within his fists so that the hands could be opened with disarming innocence. See? Nothing. It was a performance that would have dwarfed the art of any circus magician.

At times he emitted but one word and then the gestures went on by themselves, building, completing a whole sentence out of it. Other times nothing, only passes and motions dancing in the silence. Many of his answers consisted of nothing more, and his gestures were not confined to his own speech but to that of others as well; approving, condemning or evaporating it until it reappeared incorporated or digested and embodied in his answer, until one was convinced that this was a fantastic metabolism of words and ideas changing into each other cyclically.

Food had already begun its pacific invasion of tables in that nomadic way typical of our gatherings where people never sit to a regular and orderly meal from soup to nuts. Indeed, the garlic soup and, if the place has some Basque leanings like El Telescopio, the purrusalda and also in summer the gazpacho will be found there and also piñónes in some form and other things of the hard-to-crack family and smuggled-in turrón, even if it is not Christmas, with blessings to the canning industry — the refugium pecatorum of so many homesick foreigners— but never in the conventional sequence. This takes casualness by the scruff of the neck and nails it to a chair. It congeals the carefree, happy atmosphere and ruins the occasion.