By now I have allowed these things to fall out of chronological step, but it is just as well. Possibly the order in which incidents happen may not always be as acceptable as the pattern they form when seen in their totality. But be that as it may, I go back now to things I got ahead of in this haphazard account of recollections.
After the death of his landlady, there followed several unpleasant days demanding Garcia’s attention to details he did not like. A will turned up which left to him the house where they lived and also most of her money, but Garcia suffered an attack of Castilian pride and wouldn’t hear of it. I suspect that it was due to fear created by seeing Latins often depicted as graceful pimps and also in the way of an atonement for his past weakness. He had been weak, allowing his impractical dreamy nature and circumstances which he considered himself incapable of conquering to place him in the suspected position of a man living off a woman, a woman of whom he had felt ashamed, but not ashamed enough to do anything about his position, and he had even allowed that shame to carry over to her very end. Perhaps he had been only human but he was in the mood to judge himself sternly. In his own eyes he had been weak in her life and weak at her death, and now he was twice as ashamed of himself. He knew that she had a sister in Pennsylvania and communicated with her. She came with her husband and at first they were unfriendly and belligerent and threatened to bring matters to court without bothering to find out his attitude in the matter, but when finally it penetrated their minds and they realized that he was giving up everything in their favor, they became all beaming and effusive courteousness, calling him a fine Spanish gentleman and scholar, and the husband arranged everything with a lawyer and paid for all expenses, funereal and otherwise, mentioning that Garcia was in no condition to be bothered with sad financial details and showing the generosity of one who insists jovially that this round is on him.
Then Garcia, who had brought to my place what he considered his valuable personal property, most of which were his manuscripts and notes and his typewriter, said that he was going away, but he did not say where and I did not ask. I knew him well. The man was ashamed after the ordeal, like one unmasked, to have his position openly and officially discussed as the object of legal consideration when he signed his claims away. He was ashamed the way one who has suffered an accident is ashamed of his torn, dirty undergarments exposed to the public gaze. He went away with his eyes averted, but only from his former haunts and stayed in town. I did not see him for a long time but heard from him now and then through various sources.
This was the beginning of what he considered his long expiation, the downgrade epic into the mud bath. His sentimentality led him to all established situations of romantic degradation, and from his material suffering he must have derived some spiritual satisfaction.
The amount of anonymity and tolerance dispensed in these parts is amazing. He could never have gotten away with it in Spain. Hours spent on public benches with the bottle of self-justification, waiting for the final crucifixion when the policeman on the beat told him to move along to wind up naturally on the Bowery, the acknowledged Mecca. He had the romanticism of the Bowery and I had heard him speak of ending his days there in wretched, sentimental glory. The life of a hobo fascinated him as it would anyone who has not tried it. It was inevitable. One can imagine days of dark, exultant, alcoholic confusion culminating in the peregrination over the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge, from the benches of one city hall square to another, and then on to other side streets, but never, no matter how bad the stupor, down Atlantic Avenue and Columbia Street to any Spanish café where he would be seen by his countrymen. It may pass to be a bum to strangers, to play the role for foreign consumption as he would say, but not in front of those with whom one has closer bonds, even if they are impersonal. You cannot let your own people see you when you are wallowing in your own mess.
I fought the desire to look for him through some common acquaintance. I had heard that the only Spaniard who had seen him was our erstwhile friend Don Laureano, who held court in the parts Garcia frequented and who probably lent a helping hand to him and must have piloted him expertly in the new existence that Garcia had chosen, and I also suspected the Moor of having found some means of helping Garcia without offending his racial type of delicacy and formalism. But if I had sought him out in this direct and open manner, it would have been the unforgivable sin. I know that this type of loyalty in reverse is difficult to put across; the closer one is, the more outrageous such liberty becomes.
The case of Garcia was, according to the Moor, a complex one and should be allowed to play itself and straighten itself out. He had an intricate theory that when a Spaniard takes to drinking and bumming in this land, it is due to an Anglo-Saxon psychosis. He has absorbed too much of his environment, is saturated with it and requires the native, domestic antidote — must take the cure that has been perfected for this condition. Although Garcia could not speak English well at all, the barrier of the language in his case, as in that of many others, had acted only as an osmotic membrane: the words had not gone through, but the fundamental ideas and feelings had, and he was suffering from an Anglo-Saxon psychosis. The Moor concluded, with his habit of generalization, that every new language one learns, or every new environment one joins, stimulates new centers of the mind and new emotions, creates new associations of ideas, new viewpoints, and therefore produces an additional psychosis.
Nevertheless, I hoped for a chance meeting which could be brought about accidentally on purpose. This would create a scene that was sure to delight Garcia, if I knew him as I thought I did, and once in an unguarded moment while passing the time with the Moor, I suggested that we go down to the Bowery where at the moment it appeared the most natural thing in the world that we should run into Garcia. The Moor, who liked to encourage all such absurdities and acts of illogical futility, agreed readily. We were luxuriously transported in his dark Hispano-Suiza as far as Cooper Square, where we left it. Then, fortified with some ale drunk from china mugs at a very old barroom on a side street that deserved the Moor’s endorsement and with true Spartan resolution, we walked the whole length of the Bowery as far as the Manhattan Bridge and, of course, never met Garcia. We met several bodies on the sidewalk and in doorways but only examined closely two of them because of the long white hair. The second of the two was in a particularly dark spot and I walked around him bending and peering without being absolutely sure because his face was hidden in his arms. Finally the Moor grew impatient and told me to turn him over, that he would not mind, but to be careful not to hold the match too close to him — the usual sally. I felt sure that the Moor knew readily how to find Garcia if he had wanted to, but he was letting me be the victim of my own folly. We walked on and ended drinking doubleheaders of unashamed bar whiskey at Chatham Square in a bar where the Moor and the bartender appeared to be bosom friends. The Moor gave him tickets for his broadcast.
Those drinks made us hungry and the Moor took me to a Chinese place on Pell Street where we found the Señor Olózaga at a table talking to the owner of the place in his native language. This was one more piece in the jigsaw puzzle picture I had of him. He greeted us affably and we sat at the same table. They immediately began to speak Spanish. The owner of the place, who seemed to know the Moor quite well, spoke it fluently but with the same padded silkiness as the Señor Olózaga. The Moor did not seem at all surprised to find the Chink, as he called him, there and the vague feeling I had had since the beginning of that evening began to take concrete shape in terms of a cat playing with a mouse, just for the fun of it.