 Chromos,
written some twenty years later, continues in the same deceptively off-hand and wistful
tone, but is another novel altogether. Gone are many of the fanciful conceits of intrusive
characters and confused identities. It is structurally different as well: rather than
interrelated stories, Chromos is bound together by a brief frame story, which
serves as introduction and closure to the main narrative, now set in the Spanish community
of New York City, where the café/bar El Telescopio (rumored to be owned by the Chink,
Señor Olózaga) stands in for the Café de los Locos. Here gather the
"Americaniards" - those Spaniards and others of Latin origin who had come to
settle in New York - many of whom we know from previous incarnations in Locos.
Our cool and charming narrator gives us a colorful portrait of the transplanted Spaniards,
of whom he forms a part, and within that narrative other texts are interpolated: a
novel-in-progress, an uncanny would-be film script, the reveries of our old friend Fulano,
and notes to a philosophical discussion on the theory of motionless time. Amazingly, and
with seemingly little effort, it works.
It opens with the partly tongue-in-cheek, amusing
observation:
The moment one learns English, complications set in. Try as one
may, one cannot elude this conclusion, one must inevitably come back to it. This applies
to all persons, including those born to the language and, at times, even more to Latins,
including Spaniards.
. . . . a Spaniard speaking English is indeed a most incongruous
phenomenon and the acquisition of this other language, far from increasing his
understanding of life, if this were possible, only renders it hopelessly muddled and
obscure. He finds himself encumbered with too much equipment for what had been, after all,
a process as plain as living and while perhaps becoming glib and searching if oblique and
indirect, in discussing culturesque fads and interrelated topics of doubtful value even in
the English market, he gradually loses his capacity to see and think straight until he
emerges with all other English-speaking persons in complete incapacity to understand the
obvious.
If I haven’t as yet made much mention of our
narrator’s humor, let me emphasize that the novels abound in just such witticisms.
They’re fun to read. And here, as elsewhere, we’re left with something to
ponder. The language topic - and all that it implies - is a study in itself. Alfau was,
after all, a Spaniard writing in a foreign language. Conrad, Borges, Beckett, Nabokov,
Brodsky, Kosinski - those who have successfully made the leap to writing in a non-native
language invariably, for all the difficulties encountered, enrich the language and leave
their distinctly émigré mark. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney quotes Asher Z. Milbauer in her
essay on Alfau: "The works of émigré authors are often obsessively autobiographical
and ‘often accused of being repetitious and circular’ . . . because they attempt
to establish an equilibrium ‘between the "now" and the "then,"
between the "before" and the "after"’ - and, one might add
between the ‘here’ and the ‘there.’ Alfau’s novels certainly seek
such equilibrium." 4 This
observation goes a long way to understanding Alfau and his work. But of particular
interest to me is the way these writers enrich the language they have adopted. Stacy
Schiff said of Nabokov that what he wrote may not have been English but was a divine
version thereof. This holds true for Alfau as well though I would amend it to an
"exuberant version thereof." If Nabokov captures the sumptuous delicacy and
intricacy of his beloved lepidoptera, then Alfau is the proud Spanish bull, with all his
pomp and flash. Russian ballet versus gypsy flamenco.
Thus, we have Alfau’s Iberian English, which shows
itself occasionally in the hyper correct diction of the non-native user ("Therefore
the nickname El Telescopio with which our same authority on the typical had baptized
it."); the use of Latinate words ("isochronous steps," "craposanct
exultation," "in a fit of vesania" "brachistological fashion");
unusual and often jarring syntax (examples abound), all peppered with the Spanish
vernacular ("you don’t have to get so flamenco on me"), which is rich in
bullfighting metaphor: ([Dr.] de los Rios belongs to that very castizo class of Spaniards
who always neutralize the charge of extremism with a philosophical veronica and whose
lemma should be: to tame the enraged bull of radicalism with the cool cape of
tolerance." Taken as a whole it’s a most engaging and refreshing employment of
the English language. Enough to bewitch the reader in style alone.
The title Chromos refers to some old and faded
calendar chromos (chromolithographs) that the narrator discovers in the opening pages,
which reflect the array of characters and scenarios to follow. Like the immigrants in New
York City’s Spanish community, these chromos "had once been brilliantly bursting
with color and drama, but were now faded and desecrated . . . chromos in disrepute."
In the eerie story which brackets the novel, the narrator is led by Don Pedro, the Moor,
to a locked room in an old basement in a "former neighborhood." He is told to
write about the Americaniards because, according to the Moor: "You should be an
authority on the subject by now." In this dream-like sequence, where "Everything
was foreordained and all inevitable," he descends as though "hypnotized,"
with typewriter in tow, not to surface until novel’s end. We leave him having struck
a match to see in the dark while the Moor stands guard outside.
Two of the central characters are Dr. José de los Rios,
whom we’ve met before, called Dr. Jesuscristo by the Moor; and Don Pedro Guzman
O’Moor Algoracid, aka Pete Guz, in his role as popular Latin band leader (the name
given to him by the American public "in blissful disregard for Castilian
dignity") and more commonly known in the Spanish community as the Moor. "To
me," the narrator writes, "he was an absurd combination of a slightly daffy
Irish-Moorish Don Quixote with sinister overtones of Beelzebub and the only Irishman I
ever heard speak English with an Andalusian brogue." As the narrator goes on to tell
us: "They were very different . . . they represented two fundamental types of
Spaniards. It has been said many times that Cervantes portrayed the two main types of
Spaniards with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza . . . . [and] in the case of these two men,
the division was part of the national history and structure. It was ethnological and
racial within the same country, one showing the Visigoth and the other the Moorish
influences." One strongly suspects that these two characters are alter egos of our
author-narrator: there is the sound and refined doctor overlooking the whole flock,
especially during times of crisis, and the loquacious and delightfully pedantic Moor
holding court wherever he has an audience. Like Alfau, the Moor takes an avid interest in
music and science and we are given many opportunities to hear his pronounced views, such
as the lengthy discourse on the concept of motionless time in which the narrator hovers
around taking notes from the Moor’s written work on the subject (interpolated in the
text) while the Moor plays the piano, expostulating on his theory and the virtues of
Beethoven. And like Alfau, as we know him through his narrator and from those who knew the
man, Dr. de los Rios maintains a fairly rational and aloof stance within the community.
Also in the limelight is Garcia, resurrected from his demise
in Locos. Garcia has undertaken the writing of a novel in the Spanish style of
"cursi," which the narrator translates for us as "corny," and in the
hopes of getting the narrator to translate it for him into English, he insists on reading
parts of it out loud. Hence, we have this novel within the novel, read in various
installments. This work-in-progress is a picaresque tale of epic proportion tracing the
rise and fall of the Sandovol family, beginning in the 1870s and spanning three
generations - rather like what’s known in Spain as a "culebron" or popular
soap opera. Part of the fun of Garcia’s novel is the narrator’s reaction to it:
he wants to listen to please his friend, but his eyes glaze over, he drifts off, and
altogether dreads another one of Garcia’s readings. This goes as well for
Garcia’s potential film script, one of the weaker segments of the novel but integral
to the time theme: here we have a man who is able to jump ahead in time, defying it as it
were, which ties in with the many questions and difficulties of time that the novel throws
up.
Most delightful, and every bit as picaresque, is the parade
of Americaniards. At one point many of them meet up at the home of Don Bejarano and
Lunarito, reincarnated here as a dancing team, for a big paella dinner. As with any
expatriate or immigrant gathering of this sort, the crew embarks on a lively discussion of
the pros and cons of their adopted country. One complaint comes from a young El Cogote, a
bullfighter in Spain brought over to the States by the enterprising Señor Olózaga, only
to discover that the ASPCA - which he pronounces as Aspca - prevents such sport. As the
narrator tells us: "They had run into difficulties with organizations whose purpose
is to make life as dull as possible for all animals and, in the Moor’s own words,
deprive them of their right to a glorious and tragic life and death." They lament the
lack of "loitering" in America where everyone rushes from home to office and
back. They lament that wine isn’t drunk with meals. And they especially lament the
small and cramped rooms in American apartments and the lack of public toilet facilities
(of amusing interest to me, as an American expat in Spain, because this is just what we
complain about here).
The Moor is upset by Lunarito’s American way of making
paella - cooking the chicken first in a pressure cooker and using clams from a can. No
bones or shells, she says. Which prompts the Moor to pontificate on the Vanishing Paella.
Also on hand is the green Americaniard, one who has obtained his green card and is now
"more American than the Americans." This antipático "is the one who could
stand nothing Spanish since he took out his first papers." As the green man says:
"I still think that Spain is a country of darkness and I feel what every Spaniard
with common sense must feel when leaving: that he has come into the light." To which
the others laugh and jeer until he is forced to leave, which he claims is fine by him
because he believes in eating at a "civilized hour" anyway, not in the middle of
the day.
Fulano is also at this gathering and here the narrator looks
into his eyes and is pulled into Fulano’s reveries, which always involve Fulano in
some extraordinary self-sacrificing role except for the time he is drunk and daydreams of
falling in love with a mannequin, whom he violently "rapes" before cutting her
up to destroy the evidence (interestingly, the segment Alfau claims to be his favorite).
Other Americaniards, not part of the El Telescopio crew, include
the family of Don Hilarión Coello, who have quite a go round with an American life
insurance salesman, who by chance brings on Don Hilarión’s death as he is trying to
sell him a policy.
The novel concludes with the characters, at the invitation
of the Moor, gathering for a grand bacchanalian fiesta at El Telescopio, where the music,
dancing and wine flow until the wee hours as the atmosphere slowly takes on a surreal
intensity . In a state of inebriation the narrator staggers into the street near dawn and
lights a cigarette. At this point we jump to the frame story which brackets the central
narrative. Our narrator, who was left in a trance on page 23 in the dark room holding a
match, springs back to life as the match burns into his finger.
A few days later, on a Sunday, he and Dr. de los Rios are
walking down the street and run into the Moor, who tries to lure the narrator into
following him to "go down and find something to do" rather than accompanying Dr.
de los Rios to Saint Patrick’s cathedral. The narrator is torn, but at last bolts
after Dr. de los Rios. He chooses to walk up the steps to the warm "glow"
of the church rather than pursuing the Moor, who "went down into the darkening
distance." The choice does not hinge on religious principle, but has to do, one
presumes, with the narrator’s desire to escape that "dark room" to which he
had descended. The decision harks back to the Moor’s discussion of the
"motionless universe extending in undreamt-of directions," including the
possibility that a single instant could create the impression of enduring time -
speculations that the narrator found depressing (and has experienced first hand). Dr. de
los Rios objected to the Moor’s theory and it would appear the narrator is throwing
in his lot with the doctor, opting for some much-welcomed grounding. For the moment at
least.
* * *
For this reviewer, to know Alfau’s
work is to love his work. To better know the man, as one would like, we may soon expect a
biography by Ilan Stavans, who conducted an interview with Alfau in 1991 and has
been researching his enigmatic subject for some time. Based on that interview and the
collection of essays found in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1993
(essential reading for all those interested in Alfau and his work), and various stray
sources of reviews and articles that Dalkey Archive was kind enough to send my way, here
is what I have learned of the city’s errant son:
Felipe Alfau in 1964
The Man
On August 24, 1902 Felipe Alfau was born in Barcelona, the son of
a fairly well-to-do lawyer, who had been governor of provinces in the Philippines at one
time. The family - "one of journalists, politicians, and artists" - left
Barcelona early on and moved to Guernica and the Basque country before emigrating to the
U.S. in 1916. It is Guernica, then, where Alfau grew up. A telling episode from this
period can be seen in Locos, where undoubtedly we see a strong hint of the author
in the character of Garcia, who gives a first-person account of his boyhood in Guernica
(specifically, the nearby village of Vizcaitia): "When I was ten or twelve, I am not
even sure which, my family moved to Vizcaitia, a village in North Spain where they had
been in the habit of spending summers, and I became a student at the Colegio de los Padres
Salesianos. . . .Although as a child I had never been particularly fond of Vizcaitia,
where I always felt like a stranger unable to mix completely with the other children who
spoke Vascuence, a dialect I was always loath to learn, I had always enjoyed
there a life of freedom and a certain amount of play and solace. Now I had come to
Vizcaitia to live and study, rather to study than live" (sic). It was to Guernica,
too, that Alfau returned during his one and only trip back to Spain in 1959 en route to
joining some American friends in the south near Málaga. (This was the trip that prompted
him to note, against all evidence, that Guernica had escaped unscathed from the war.)
Once settled in New York City the fourteen-year-old Alfau
quickly picked up the language and quite easily immersed himself in the dazzling new
culture. His father, too old to learn a new language quickly, nevertheless made a decent
living editing the Spanish weekly Noticias. The young Alfau at first wanted to be
an orchestra conductor and in fact wrote music criticism in Spanish for La Prensa,
but after taking a couple of courses at Columbia University, he began writing in English.
He wrote his first novel, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, in 1928 although it was
not published until 1936 when Farrar & Rinehart picked it up for a special series to
be distributed to subscribers by mail. It met, not surprisingly, with little fanfare. Next
came the book of children’s stories Old Tales from Spain, which saw
publication in 1929, seven years before Locos. During this interim Alfau began
writing poetry, which he penned in his native tongue because, as he tells us, ". . .
poetry is too close to the heart, whereas fiction is a mental activity, an invention,
something foreign, distant." 5 Sentimental Songs (La poesía cursi), a collection of the poetry
from this period, went unpublished until 1992 when Dalkey Archive produced a bilingual
edition. Last came Chromos, written in the late forties and stuck away in a
drawer for lack of finding a publisher.
Alfau’s day-to-day life was taken up with his work as
translator of the prosaic documents at Morgan Bank in Manhattan, work which didn’t
seem to rankle the unsung writer as much as one might suspect. As Alfau later said, he
wrote his fiction and poetry mainly to pass the time at the bank (though Locos,
as noted, was written while he was unemployed), evidently harboring no great ambition to
make his name as writer. He married twice, first to a Jewish woman with whom he had a
daughter, and secondly to an Irish American. Chandler Brossard, an acquaintance of
Alfau’s at the time, gives us an amusing and opinionated sketch of the wives:
"[H]e had first married a Jew, which I think upset him very much, and I think that
this is one of the reasons he quit writing for a very long time: she was a real sergeant,
always driving him to write, and he finally just couldn’t stand it." The second
wife was a young girl of fifteen or sixteen whom he’d been forced to marry when her
father discovered them living together in a basement room. As Brossard says: "She was
a lower-class girl, daughter of a fireman, a real lower-class Irish American. To be honest
you couldn’t quite believe these two together - a circus act: there was this
Moorish-looking guy, really elegant, with great style; and there was this balloon from
Brooklyn, a messenger from the bank where he worked. . . The whole thing didn’t make
sense." 6
There is much that doesn’t make much sense about
Alfau, who, as he says of the Moor, appears more full of contradictions the more one knows
him. On the one hand he is a marvelous chronicler of humanity - skeptical but intelligent,
full of wit and humor - and on the other hand he is a bigot and a fascist. Chandler
Brossard claims that Alfau suffered from paranoia and even underwent shock treatments at
one time, which may explain something of the incongruity, but it probably has as much to
do with the time and place of his birth, nearly a century ago. Be that as it may, we do
know he has always been reclusive and difficult, often alienating friends with his views.
We must await Ilan Stavans’ biography to shed more light on the man himself. What
remains are the splendid novels, novels that took nearly half a century to gain
recognition, well past the time when Alfau could rejoice in their success. He was, as
Dalkey Archive’s Steven Moore (the editor who discovered Alfau) says,
"bemused" at his rediscovery, but for Alfau: "It would have interested me
much more when I was younger . . . .The whole thing is too late." 7
Thanks to Dalkey Archive Press, however - a small press
dedicated to bringing back in print forgotten or passed-over English language writers
(often those who were/are ahead of their time or too experimental for the mainstream
press) as well as noted foreign authors in translation - it is not too late for us and
future generations to take delight in the wild, inventive and wonderful world that is
Alfau.
Notes
1 See Susan
Elizabeth Sweeney's discussion of how Alfau predates the modernist metaphysical detective
story in "Aliens, Aliases, and Alibis: Alfau’s Locos as a Metaphysical
Detective Story." The Review of Contemporary Literature, Spring 1993. Ed. John
O’Brien. Illinois State University. Specifically p. 208 and footnote 7 p. 214.
2 Carmen Martín Gaite, "The Triumph of the
Exception" from the introduction to Old Tales of Spain by Felipe Alfau.
Translated from Gaite's Spanish translation and adapted by Ilan Stavans. Rpt. RCF, Spring
1993. p. 177.
3 Margo Hammond, "Fame Finally Comes Knocking On
Felipe Alfau's Door." St. Petersburg Times, 11 November 1990. [Includes a brief
interview with Alfau by Steven Moore and John O'Brien.]
4 Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, p. 207.
5 IIan Stavans, in "Anonymity: An Interview with
Felipe Alfau." RCF Spring 1993. p. 149.
6 Chandler Brossard, in "Two or Three Things I
Know About Him." RCF, Spring 1993. p. 194.
7 Margo Hammond, from accompanying interview.
Texts Cited
Alfau, Felipe. Chromos, Illinois State University: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
_________. Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, ISU: Dalkey Archive Press;
first paperback edition, 1997.
O'Brien, John. ed., The Review of Contemporary Literature, Spring 1993, ISU:
Dalkey Archive Press.
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barcelona review #12 
Felipe Alfau: 
and
reincarnations - and in this segment he focuses on the forlorn Fulano, who did everything
he could to be noticed, but was ignored by everyone. Fulano appeals to the writer-narrator
to make him a character and when asked his qualifications, Fulano claims his very lack of
importance should count. The narrator says that present-day literature is already full of
that type of character, but he goes on to make something of Fulano anyway with the help of
his friend Dr. José de los Rios - and a good story it is, seamlessly blending the reality
of the café character with a fictional tale which sends Fulano on a quest for identity.
Thus we have a fiction within a fiction, so tightly constructed that the reader is hardly
aware of the fact. Nor is the English reader probably aware of the fact that the name
Fulano in Spanish translates as "So-and-so" or "what’s-his-name,"
adding one of those piquant, bilingual touches so familiar in Nabokov. So, when events
conspire to Fulano’s identity being usurped by a criminal, the criminal is referred
to as "So-and-so who had escaped from prison," which cleverly serves to further
bind the two no-name characters. Fulano appears once in Chromos, too, where in a
double whammy he is referred to as "Fulano something-or-other." 
Fiction