Then he came down and wandered through deserted streets at night. All of them ran downhill and he kept turning toward the east until he came to a building under construction. The street floor was still open, strewn with rubbish, broken bricks and cement-caked wheelbarrows, a forest of steel beams and wooden uprights.
He walked deeper and deeper into the building and with an unexpected feeling of joy knew that he was lost and therefore would reach at last the cellar of the old house. This was the moment when he always began to descend the wide, long ramp which led to the subterranean town. He had been looking forward to this with happy anticipation. It was a miniature city and he must walk carefully so that in places his head would not scrape the rocks on top.
He walked across a square not bigger than a medium-sized room, and through one of the streets that led away from the square he could see a little elevated train pass. It was like a toy train. He saw light shining on the small sidewalks from the doorways of these dollhouses. He was too big to go into any of them, but he did not want to go in anyway. He wanted to find the cellar of the old house.
It was very late at night and he knew that the night would go on and on beyond the point where the sun would have risen and set many times until it would never rise again. Although the puppet town was deserted because it was so late, the air was charged with hostility, the enemy entrenched in the houses. He walked faster and took the street that led from the opposite corner of the square. Here too, the light from the little doorways struck the pavement like a series of hurdles in his way which he must negotiate. Every time he passed a doorway, he felt the same creeping sensation up his back. All this part of the dream was very vivid because he had dreamed it many times. Then he came as expected to the doorway on the frame of which was the face. It was the face of a toothless old man with a sharp nose, twinkling eyes and long white hair. It was a face made of reddish rubber, like some small ones he had had when only a boy, and it was contorted with cackling laughter, laughing at him. He raised a stick he had picked up along the way and struck at the face and the laughter gradually died out like a motor faltering to a stop. He walked still faster and arrived at the cellar.
He went straight to the trapdoor on the floor, lifted it and began to descend to a second cellar and then a third and a fourth, until he emerged into the sumptuous hallway with the long row of elevators on one side and the luxurious lounges on the other. There was much activity and people milling around and, mixing with the crowd, he entered one of the elevators unnoticed. He was carried up and found himself alone again.
He was walking up a steep road on the other side of the Hudson River, which was surprising because he knew that he had been moving east. The road went up, walled by high rocks on each side, and he was dragging a body which might be his own. He walked up the road laboriously pulling at the body which grew heavier with each step and then at the top of the road was his home. The door was ajar and there was light inside. At the threshold he let go of the body and entered. The room was in great disorder, as if a struggle had taken place in it. A lamp was overturned but the light still burned. He looked madly about and remembered his own words very well. He said to himself:
“Is this my life?”
I became conscious of the voices all around me and found myself, without any effort on my part, outside the man’s mind, but I was disconcerted and wanted to regain some composure by looking at the outside of other people as one is supposed to do. The Moor was looking at the door, no doubt waiting for Dr. de los Rios to come in, and I realized that my visit into this man’s thoughts must have taken an incredibly short time. This did not help my desired composure and I looked at the other faces there more intently, seeking normality and distraction.
At the other tables I recognized the best importations from Spain. There was the dancing team, Lunarito and Bejarano. There was a famous newspaperman and foreign correspondent who had to his credit a long list of deportations from various countries. If one wanted to meet him, the Moor had said, one had to catch him between trains. He was sitting with the best Spanish importer of antiques who owned a very exclusive shop on Madison Avenue and had lent for the occasion the old Spanish tapestries and shawls which hung from the balcony that ran along one wall of the dining room and gave things an air of magnificent refinement contrasting harshly with all this bottle drinking. The other man at their table was the owner of a Spanish newspaper then published in New York.
They were entertaining two women: one old and quite ferocious, watching like a hawk over the other one who was very young, blonde and angelical. The old harridan was talking through much wine-swallowing and lip-smacking about what I understood was her favorite pastime: to sing the graces of her angelical daughter to anyone who would listen. The daughter sat quietly, looking more and more like a picture by a primitive, sipping ojen. Her name went well with her looks. She was the incomparable Angeles Medinaceli, La Niña de los Madroños, currently considered the best flamenco singer in Spain and on a professionally exploring trip here.
At a table between hers and ours were two men and a woman. One of the men was El Cogote, the bullfighting brother of Bejarano. The woman was the Carmen I had met at their house, still dressed in black despite the weather. The other man was a phenomenally strong and candid-looking chap, Pilarte, a wrestler turned prizefighter who had developed his muscles loading and unloading ships on the docks of north Spain and who was advertised as the man who could not be knocked out even with a sledgehammer. This was the very latest importation of the Señor Olózaga. In fact, the Señor Olózaga had brought to this country most of the celebrities gathered there that memorable day, and he had toyed with the idea of exhibiting his strongman and put his advertising to a literal test as a publicity stunt, inviting anyone to strike him with a hammer, but Dr. de los Rios had convinced him that this would not make very good publicity.
It was while pondering these things that I heard the voice coming from a table on our other side. It was pampered, sibilant, yet shrill with faked indignation:
“She ought to be thrashed! She ought to be positively and properly chastised!” The voice was speaking English and perhaps that is why it arrested my attention.
Not having heard what led up to pronouncing this sentence of corporal punishment, I turned to have a look and, of course, it was the green man.
Looking at him the place became for a fleeting moment an ice cream parlor, but looking at the two elderly ladies sitting with him, the place immediately resumed its proper aspect of some café in south Spain visited by English tourists. They were having a regular time of it, drinking dutifully from their bottles.
The green man was doing his level best to appear as if he did not belong there, which he did not. It was not that he was speaking English with the two ladies, because possibly they did not speak Spanish, but his manner, or rather, mannerisms and implied condescension and shamefaced acknowledgment of his familiarity with the atmosphere as something remembered from an assumed oppressed past and wretched childhood, intended to convey very plainly that he was slumming among reminiscences that were sweetly revolting.
He waved and winked at Bejarano and, in an aside to one of the ladies, he was carried to remark loudly: “Some Latins are disgustingly masculine.” This with no apparent connection with anything previously said: “But they can discard conventions and have a bang-up rousing good time. You bet, girlie — the time of your life!”