The Novels | The Man | Bibliography Introduction Last year I learned that Dalkey Archive Press had published a Spanish writer, born in Barcelona in 1902, whom neither I nor anyone I knew had ever heard of. Who is this Felipe Alfau, I wondered, who seemed to pass unknown in his native city? Thanks to Dalkey Archive, Ive since learned a great deal about Alfau, whose oeuvre consists of two novels (Locos: A Comedy of Gestures [1936] and Chromos [1990], the latter nominated for the National Book Award), which comprise the major works; a poetry collection (Sentimental Songs: La poesía cursi [1992]); and a book of childrens stories (Old Tales from Spain [1929]). If the publishing dates look odd, that is because, I've learned, Alfau languished in obscurity for over fifty years, at which point Dalkey Archive sought to set things aright. Ive learned this too: that he is everything the book jackets boast - a writer far ahead of his time, using techniques that would later be "discovered" by such postmodernists as John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon; that he is a mesmerizing storyteller; that he has lived most of his life in New York and written in English except for the poetry; that he is still alive as of this writing, living in a retirement home in Queens; that there are those who know of him in Barcelona although few; and that although he is recognized here, it is not surprising that Barcelona hasnt gone out of its way to claim him as a native son, given that he is a self-proclaimed Franquista, who goes so far as to claim that the devastation of Guernica during the civil war was sheer communist fabrication. He supports the Machiavellian idea of tyranny over democracy, the only two options possible in the world. And he is, god help us, an anti-Semite (a fact he denies, but those who know him claim is true) and not too keen on blacks or Hispanics either. He is, at 97 anyway, a crusty old curmudgeon with hardly any appreciable views. Still . . . there are those novels.



Despite the disheartening personal convictions, the novels are ultimately what matter, of course, and Barcelona (and Spain) should really pay more attention. Unlike Pound, that other wrong-headed genius, there is no evidence of dubious politics or personal prejudices to be found in Alfaus work (though, forearmed and with a fine-tooth comb, one could find the odd innuendo, simply given the pre-PC era in which it was written), which so strongly pits the writer against his writing. Alfau the writer, back in the first half of the century, created through his narrator a charming, erudite, assured but self-effacing young man observing and mixing with the diverse characters in the Café de los Locos in Toledo, Spain (Locos) or adrift in a backstreet Spanish enclave of New York City (Chromos) where home base is the Spanish bar El Telescopio. This narrator, who remains nameless, guides us through both Locos and Chromos, introducing us to a colorful cast of oddball and bohemian characters - pimps, thieves, beggars, dancers, musicians, detectives, prostitutes, priests - who spring to life with the force and vitality of a Spanish flamenco. The narrator stands on the sidelines and spins his tales, and tales within tales, occasionally joining in and chatting, jostling, drinking. Hes unassuming, dashing, foreign (to the non-Spanish), witty, enigmatic, a "writer" by trade without much money but time on his hands; somewhat aloof from the rest of the madding crowd of misfits, but a part of them still - and altogether delightful: no wonder Mary McCarthy in her Afterword to Locos refers to him as her "fatal type." One cant help fall under his spell. This is the Alfau that I have learned to love, even if his creator has outlived his time and spouts inanities . . . . and this is the Alfau that Barcelona should take pride in. The Novels Locos opens with a Prologue by the author-narrator in which he blithely states that the novel is written in short stories "with the purpose of facilitating the task of the reader," who, he says, may freely begin at the beginning, the end, or the middle, depending on his mood. He reckons, in fact, that it can be read "in any fashion except, perhaps upside down." He goes on to thank his characters "for their anarchic collaboration," which can lead to the character of a brother or son changing midway to the lover of his sister or mother "because he has heard that men sometimes make love to women." What follows are eight self-contained but interrelated pieces, mostly all set in Spain, in which the characters and author interact and often vie for the page.



As familiar as this ploy may seem to us now, it is astounding to read in a novel written in 1928. Indeed the metafictional, self-reflexive elements employed by Alfau were not be to seen until a good quarter-century later in American fiction when Nabokov hit the scene and opened the door to the postmodernists. (Even considering Nabokovs early work in Berlin, Alfau predates him by two years.) 1 Mary McCarthy in her Afterword says that what she fell in love with in Locos "was the modernist novel as detective story," which she aptly compares to the detective work the reader encounters in Pale Fire. Others with whom he has been compared - Calvino, Borges, Flann O'Brien, (and more recently Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon) - all came later. Only Pirandello, whose Six Characters in Search of an Author had just been translated into English in the mid-20s, and Spain's Miguel de Unamuno (as discussed in Carmen Martín Gaites intro to Alfaus Old Tales) 2 were experimenting with similar metafictional techniques. Alfau, on all counts, was far ahead of his time.



"Identity," the first story in Locos, sets the scene and so really is a good place to begin, although it serves as a perfect ending as well. Here we find our author-narrator in the Café le los Locos in Toledo "where bad writers were in the habit of coming . . . in quest of characters . . . . [Here] one could find some very good secondhand bargains and also some fairly good, cheap, new material." The narrator then gives us a rundown of the characters milling around the café that day - all of whom will later appear in various incarnations 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."



The next piece, "A Character," takes the author-character convolutions to their height. Here the narrator begins by saying that he has had difficulties writing the story he intended to write because of the "rebellious qualities" of his characters which prevented him from writing it. The narrator tells us that he is in the home of his friend Don Laureano Baez, who is not there at the moment. As he awaits his friends return, he decides to begin his story. He pens one line in which he mentions the character Gaston Bejarano, and then is interrupted by the doorbell. At this point Gaston jumps in and takes over with the intention of telling the story in his own words. As Gaston tells his story of suddenly desiring to speak to a strange woman he has seen in the street at night, he says he wanted no witnesses because: "It was, after all, my first escape into reality and I felt a bit shy." He continues later: "She was a real being and I was only a character. Had I stolen into her world of reality, or had she entered into my world of fancy? . . . Who would be the stronger: she as a real being or I as a character?" This is the crux of the story, the exploration of just who is in control of the flow of the narrative: the author? the author as narrator? the characters themselves? Its all rather chaotic as everyone wants to get a word in, but amazingly they work together and the result is another fine, highly readable story with the most perfect of endings, rather like a pleasing but cacophonous jazz interlude that fuses into harmonious relief, and here one finds a clue to the answer.



The rest of the stories strut out a delightful array of characters: a beggar who lives in luxury and whose mistress is part daughter, wife, maid, and secretary; one of the first fingerprint experts, who clings to his theories at all cost; a Madrileño Prefect of Police who is hosting a police convention when the power gets cut, leaving the entire metropolis in complete darkness and bringing out the thief in everyone; the feisty Carmen who has sex with her brother and is then packed off to a convent; her brother Gaston, the pimp, who elsewhere is seen living with his mistress "Carmen"; the huge, dark and exotic Señor Olózaga, a.k.a. Juan Chinelato and The Black Mandarin; Tia Mariquita, an ancient actress adorned in marabou feathers, with orange hair and makeup cracked over heavy wrinkles; Doña Micaela Valverde, the necrophil; Garcia, childhood mate of Alfaus (so Garcia tells us) turned con man turned fingerprint expert turned poet; and many more.



Our author-narrator weaves in and out of the stories. He is always apparent, either as one of the characters in the group he describes or as the writer commenting on the difficulties of the craft. Midway through one story he typically interrupts the action to state: "As I cannot describe any conversation or action, I shall endeavor to set down some thoughts, a bad habit which writers have of trying to convince the readers that they can steal into their characters minds. However, I may be exonerated, since my characters fail me in a persistent way and refuse to talk or even move and I cannot very well leave a blank space." At which point he takes up the narrative.



Other times he adds a footnote to a characters utterance to explain that this particular character forced himself into the narrative. Once, when a couple bursts on the scene, he tells us in a footnote that although they appeared against his will he "can no longer disregard them, as the other characters have already heard them and taken notice." As others have noted, this rather glaring example of self-reflexive whimsy is the only aspect that dates the narrative, but its tolerable; and if one keeps the 1928 publishing date in mind, its impressively novel.



The stories themselves are vivid, spirited and well-crafted with a freshness to them unlike many contemporary offerings, and the book can be enjoyed on this level alone - as a collection of mesmerizing tales - but the real edge (and the real fun) comes from winding through the novel with its narrator, who drags the reader through the whole creative process while he, the narrator, wrestles his way through. How much of this exposed process is for effect and how much is it a genuine fight for control? Maybe a bit of the latter (Alfau wrote the novel at age 26 while unemployed, in between feedings of his baby daughter, and in hopes of making some money), 3 but clearly the authors strong hand looms over it all, which it must do to weave the connecting thread. And the more one looks at that thread, the more thats revealed. On the other hand, once one has hold of the thread it doesn't unravel so much as form a Möbius strip. Im reminded of a friend of mine who read Pale Fire and ended up with three index boxes full of notes. Hed done all of his cross-referencing, had all the facts in order, and felt quite good about it, but didnt quite know what to make of it in the end.



And so the astute reader of Locos is lured to follow the transformations of various characters: Lunarito, for example, first appears as the girl in the street - one Maria Luisa Baez, called Lunarito because of a birthmark - who entices the character Gaston in "A Character"; later in the same story the narrator introduces us to the "real" character Gaston, an old man known as El Cogote. This Gaston, we learn, is bedridden following a bewitching encounter with a girl in the street - the story with which we began - who, it is discovered, was found murdered a day before he saw her, driving El Cogote to the brink of madness. In his delirium he is plagued by a dream in which he is back at his family home playing with his younger sister, who has the face of Lunarito. He pushes her into a room which the family avoids out of superstition, and when she emerges she is white haired and tells Gaston that he has killed her. At this moment in the story, the dream narrative is interrupted by El Cogotes mistress, whom we know as Carmen, only now she too is called Lunarito. The ubiquitous Lunarito is actually a character in the frame story: the companion of the wealthy beggar Don Laureano Baez, described as being "one-fourth daughter, one-fourth wife, one-fourth maid and one-fourth secretary." She appears again in future stories in this role of companion to Don Laureano and later, when Don Laureano is imprisoned, as the maid of the poet Garcia. Carmen, too, appears as both mistress and sister to Gaston as well as the beautiful nun who drives a priest to suicide. Reading later of Carmen and Gastons incestuous relationship at the family home gives deeper meaning to old El Cogotes nightmare and his confusion of the women. Elusive and ever-shifting identities abound as the narrator sculpts from the raw, "fairly good, cheap" material at hand - those café habitués.



Other threads are more subtle. Anna Shapiro, in her review of Locos for the New Yorker (reprinted in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1993), points out the character Garcias probable implication in a murder which leads to an innocent mans conviction, an implication based on a hint dropped in a former story and easily overlooked by the reader (by me anyway) who is quick to cast blame on an irate and humiliated son.



It should be pointed out, too, as careful readers have noted, that the first story "Identity" holds more meaning than at first appears. There we see not only the café characters whom the narrator will mold into "characters," but a foreshadowing of whats to come; thus, the old junk dealer, who will appear as the fingerprint expert, leaves a dirty hand-mark on the wall while he tries to peddle a Chinese figurine with a fierce expression - later incarnated as the Black Mandarin. The fact that the figurine is dropped and broken by the junk dealer has no special meaning until one has made one's way through the labyrinth of stories and doubles back. Likewise with Sister Caramel: "Look at that nun. The one that is interfering now between El Cogote and the woman. She is quite attractive to be a nun. She would make a good woman of the world." And Lunarito? She is appropriately the waitress to the whole motley crew.



Trying to make sense of the many connecting threads can drive one loco, but as with a Zen koan an amazing thing happens while contemplating the connections: the reader is pulled into a similar creative exercise to that of the author and is hit somewhere along the line with the pinging realization that the process of configuration is the end in itself. Pure Nabokov! And - in a later era - pure Pynchon, whose postmodern "detective" novel, The Crying of Lot 49, ingeniously induces a similar response.



Stories within stories, stories winding in or back on themselves, characters who metamorphose and wrestle with the author for a voice - Locos is a delightful metafiction that self-consciously lays bare the beauty, agony and mystery of the creative process in all of its convoluted perplexity, make of it what you may, and keeps the reader entertained all the way. Left with the equivalent of my friends index boxes of notes to Pale Fire, I took special note upon rereading the narrators instructions in the Prologue: " . . . the reader is expected to sit back and watch this procession of strange people and distorted phenomena without a critical eye. To look for anything else, or to take seriously this bevy of irresponsible puppets and the inconsistency of the author, would not be advisable, as by doing so and imagining things that might lend themselves to misinterpretation, the reader would only disclose, beneath a more or less entertaining comedy of meaningless gestures, the vulgar aspects of the common tragedy." Yet the sly fox knows well take the bait and where it will (and will not) take us. Pure Alfau!