One block from our destination we got out and before I had time to look into the driver’s compartment, the car drove away. We walked along the dark street and I tried to lag behind, to find one last desperate excuse, but the Moor took hold of my arm and marched me until we were in front of the old basement. Then came the blinding flash of hope:
“But the key. I am sure I don’t have it.”
“Seek and thou shall find; haa—”
Inserting one’s hand in one’s pocket and finding it empty is conceded to create the deepest consternation, but this was worse; the key was there and I was crushed.
“But suppose that someone has moved in since.”
“Don’t worry. It is empty all right.” And I knew that he was right, that he was master and this was destiny, that there was no escape: “Go and get it over with. It won’t take long.”
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“No. I’ll wait for you out here and act as a lookout” The shameless conspiracy of it, the insulting confabulatory implication: “But give me a cigarette. I am all out of them.” The crowning insult.
I gave him the cigarette and lighted it for him endeavoring to postpone things — the nadir of abjection — but then the conviction that I was dreaming decided me to sleep the thing through to certain awakening and calmly I inserted a key which I had never expected to use again. As I did this, the last hopeful and irrelevant memory of the Moor’s ancestor returning to Granada ran through my mind, but the door opened easily and swung inward without a squeak.
The street outside had been dark enough, but the room was pitch-black. I still held the matches in my hand and lit one. There was no furniture, and as I advanced toward the far wall, I felt my shadow creeping and growing behind me and bending with the ceiling as if to pounce.
Ever since I had entered the former neighborhood and as we approached this house, the tense anticipation had been growing at a rate suggesting the law of the inverse square which I had often heard Don Pedro mention, and on entering the room, it exploded with the full force of memories that were overpowering as the present multiplied by their distance.
I looked around carefully, keeping my vigilant shadow unmolested behind and above me, like a cobra. The stains and cracks on the walls became those of bare stone, creating confusing and bizarre designs like those of a sarcophagus. Some old calendar chromos still clung to them: one showing a man with calañes and short jacket serenading a young lady with high comb and very black, mournful eyes at a window with bars and profusely surrounded by flowers; another was a chapel with a recumbent bullfighter dying on a couch with a beshawled woman, her head buried in his bloody chest and all around the austere, stoic, classical countenances of the loyal members of his cuadrilla and a tearful old lady staring her reproach at the altar and the eternal old priest withholding discreetly his understanding and faith and soothing blessing, but attentive to the duties of his office in performing the last rites; chromos that had once been brilliantly bursting with color and drama, but were now faded and desecrated by fly stains; chromos in disrepute.
The bookcase with its books was still at the far wall, the only piece of furniture left in that room once abandoned in the great divide of life. I reached for one of the books, felt the thick dust on it and pulled. A cockroach crawled over my hand and I let go of the book. It fell on the floor where it lay open and I fancied I saw more bugs run out of it in all directions. They ran up the walls, over and under the chromos which in the uncertain light of the match seemed to oscillate painfully, to grow dolefully animated and gather the deceptive depth of a reverie, reaching for the cracks, the shadows in the walls as if to pull them like a shroud over their shame, to resume their disturbed sleep, and as the walls seemed to recede, the shadows running through them like waves, merged with the pictures to form a confused tapestry depicting people and scenes that came to life, but more like things remembered or imagined, because the walls were no longer there.
“You must let me tell you about this family in Spain,” Garcia said. “It is like a novel and for that matter, I am making one of it. It could only have happened in Spain.”
I thought that many people are always saying that a thing could only happen in a certain place. Why? and I told him so.
He said that I had not heard the story yet, but he had told me several times about this family. “Well, possibly I have, but superficially. I would like to tell you more in detail and discuss the novel I expect to make out of it with you. I have all the data which I obtained from several people, but mostly from my mother. She knew them very intimately. Are you doing anything this afternoon?”
I had seen this coming for some time and I thought that I might as well get it over with. Garcia’s persistent enthusiasm about belles lettres is more that of a Latin American than a Spaniard. We were at the café El Telescopio where we had lunched together and were now facing that vacuous panorama to which most of my countrymen are committed by traditional respectful consent and which extends indefinitely after every meal, connecting it effortlessly with the next. So, I reached for my bottle, took a good swallow and resigned myself to listen.
But first, and to ape Garcia, you must let me tell you about El Telescopio which, as he would contend, could only happen in New York.
I cannot remember the real name of the place, but it was a remarkable café. There were no wineglasses in sight at El Telescopio and everybody drank out of the bottle — a tradition that was started by a fantastic habitué, a certain Don Pedro, known to most of us as the Moor, considered an authority in anything typically Spanish. He had stated sententiously that the true Spaniard would drink manzanilla from cañitas, sherry from chatos, but regular wine only from the bottle, leaving the wineskin for picnics and ordinary wine, but glasses, never.
Now, I wouldn’t put it past him to have made the whole thing up out of his own head, because this fellow could invent traditions out of thin air to suit his fancy or perhaps his lazy thirst as in this case. I have questioned other Spaniards on the subject and some have said that they had never given the matter a thought but that now that they thought of it. Others have denied it flatly and called it a manifestation of distorted patriotism, Españolism, or plain nonsense and the matter stands there, but the result is that the thing caught and at El Telescopio all those Spaniards who insist on living in Spain wherever they are sat from morning to night drinking wine out of bottles and when they leaned back to drink, sighting their interlocutor along the label or squinting into the green depths to search for a last drop, they certainly looked like some tipsy astronomer aiming a wobbly telescope at the stars too distant to matter in one’s condition of libating bliss. When they did this in the summer, sitting by the open windows or on the patio, the effect was perfect Therefore the nickname of El Telescopio with which our same authority on the typical had baptized it
This café was located on Cherry Street where there were others like it, although not quite as big, as popular or offering such a representative cross section of all classes of my people. It gathered laborers, businessmen in the import and export lines, nightclub entertainers in moments of repentance at their disloyal success, plain expatriates and even derelicts from the not-too-distant Bowery in extraordinary moments of self-respecting affluence, all of whom, no matter how different otherwise, had two things in common: their language and the phenomenal respect which every