Locos by Felipe Alfau

First published: 1936

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: Toledo and Madrid, Spain

Principal Characters:

• Dr. José de los Rios, medical attendant to the Crazies
• Fulano, a character in search of an identity
• Don Benito, the prefect of police
• Gaston (El Cogote) Bejarano, Don Benito’s nephew
• Juan Chinelato, a Spanish-Chinese strongman
• Don Baez, a professional beggar
• Sister Carmela, also known as
• Carmen, and
• Lunarito, Gaston’s sister
• Garcia, a beggar and fingerprint expert

The Novel

Locos: A Comedy of Gestures consists of a prologue with interconnected stories narrated by an unnamed writer who observes prostitutes, gamblers, and thieves gathering at a café, where writers may choose from among them for characters in their stories. “Identity” concerns Fulano, a persona who searches for recognition as a real character. Dr. José de los Rios suggests that Fulano fake his suicide, then return to Madrid, where he and the writer will help make him a more substantive character. Fulano does as the doctor instructs but does not realize that an escaped convict then assumes Fulano’s identity, becoming better known than Fulano himself was. Fulano jumps successfully to his death following promises of literary immortality.

In “A Character,” Gaston (El Cogote) Bejarano observes a beautiful woman (Lunarito) walking alone in the rain. After they exchange kisses, the girl then disappears, and Bejarano returns to his lover, Carmen. The doctor takes the author to visit El Cogote, who, having learned of Lunarito’s murder, has become ill. He recounts a recurring dream in which his sister, Carmen, whom he retrieved from a convent following a family scandal, has Lunarito’s face. El Cogote provides one ending, the writer another.

In “The Beggar,” Garcia is devastated to discover that he has accidentally given another beggar his gold coin. Garcia tracks down the beggar, Don Baez, in a sumptuous house. Although he initially tries to retrieve the coin dishonestly, Garcia is taken aback at Baez’s generosity. Breaking down, he confesses his lies. Baez forgives him and promises Garcia future assistance.

In “Fingerprints,” Don Gil Bejarano, in order to compel Spanish citizens to have their fingerprints on file, offers his own, but the effort fails. He continues to insist to Prefect Don Benito that if fingerprints belonging to a man in China were found at a crime scene in Spain, he would nevertheless be found guilty. Later, as Don Gil plays cards at home, his wife, Felisa, catches their daughter, Carmen, and son, Gaston, being intimate together. Benito calls on Gil to accompany him to his office, where he explains that his fingerprints were found at the site of a grisly murder. He has unwittingly become “the man from China.” “The Wallet” takes place during a police convention while a citywide power outage affords criminals an opportunity to rob. Pepe bets his uncle, Prefect Don Benito, that Benito will be robbed as soon as they part company on their way home. Later, someone bumps into Pepe on the street. Realizing that his wallet is missing, Pepe beats the man to get it back. Later, Pepe discovers that the wallet is not his. The following morning, Benito tells Pepe that someone robbed him of his wallet. Pepe offers Benito back the wallet he had wrested from the man. Having stolen his own brother’s wallet the previous night, El Cogote returns it, with apologies. Overcome by the morning’s events, Don Benito tries to sit down, but he is in too much pain.

“Chinelato” involves a Chinese boy who learns how to cheat, gamble, and steal. Juan Chinelato becomes well known for his powerful physique and later weds Senorita Iturbe, whom he delights in tormenting. Once she gives birth, Chinelato cooks and serves their child to her. He later becomes Olózaga, a butterfly charmer in his own circus, resells suits from corpses, and finally fades from memory.

In “The Necrophil,” Dona Micaela Valverde is fixated on death so much that she attends a score of funerals daily and goes into a prolonged rigor mortis state. Dr. de los Rios tells Micaela that suicide is the only cure for her morbid fascination. After a failed suicide attempt, she is done with death.

“A Romance of Dogs” concerns Garcia, a boy tormented by hours of religious study and merciless beatings by Catholic priests. While he is walking home, a dog threatens him, while at school a second dog attacks tardy students. Things brighten when Padre Inocencio and Sister Carmela join in their instruction. While Garcia is occasionally confused by Carmela’s sexual manner, she and the padre make his life bearable until her brother, El Cogote, elopes with her and Padre Inocencio jumps to his death. The writer periodically visits Garcia who, as an adult, goes mad and blind.

The Characters

The majority of the characters who populate Locos are on the periphery of society, either by their own design or because they overstep boundaries of acceptable behavior. Dr. de los Rios and the unidentified writer function as complementary halves that comment to one another and constitute the whole of one who observes the strange behavior of others with very little direct involvement. Alfau, clearly intrigued with the thin line between crime and the law, often uses his characters to play out this fascination rather than develop them fully. The focus is more on plot in some of the stories. In “The Wallet,” Prefect Benito’s sore bottom indicates that Pepe mistakenly beat up his own uncle the night before, thinking that Benito had stolen his wallet. The lack of specific character development places an emphasis on the power of the wallet itself as a source of corruption. Even family members are susceptible to the lure of financial gain at the expense of their blood relations.

Repeatedly, Alfau drops clues along the way, impelling the reader to pick up the scent and pursue answers. Chinelato, the Philippine-born Chinese man, is afforded a long thirty pages in this slender book. Without parents and a minority against whom others vent their racist wrath, he becomes increasingly more violent and misogynist. Like necrophil Micaela Valverde or even fragile Garcia, Chinelato endures to the bitter end. When he becomes too old for acts of physical bravado, he starts a business hawking dead people’s clothes. Relatively little space is devoted to the appearance of the characters except as their various eccentricities become personified: Micaela is cadaverous; Chinelato is enormous and musclebound. Just as life is unpredictable, there is an underlying danger of any one of these creations wresting the narrative away from the author. Readers first meet Garcia as an adult beggar, then (in one of many time twists) in “A Romance of Dogs” as a child forced to toil under the Machiavellian tutelage of Spanish priests. It is this character that reads closest to authentic experience, as his sexuality is awakened by Sister Carmela. When her pimpish brother, El Cogote, whisks her away and Padre Inocencio, heartbroken, leaps to his death, such events are never discussed, either by the priests or amongst the male students; the incident is buried, along with any possibility of young Garcia’s being allowed to fathom it or grieve for the loss of the two people dearest to him. The narrator meets Garcia years later in Madrid; he is living alone but across from the ever watchful de los Rios. Garcia slowly loses his mind, embracing trees and repeatedly crying, “Spring is coming!” His attendant is the omnipresent Lunarito, the near-silent woman who tends to male needs without complaint. Some characters in Locos descend into madness rather than die, as though they have made a pact with the devil to exchange their mental stability for their physical presence on earth.

Critical Context

Written when Felipe Alfau, a Spanish immigrant, was twenty-six years old and living in New York, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures was published eight years later in 1936. Alfau’s Old Tales from Spain, a collection of children’s stories, was published in 1929. Although he produced a second novel, Chromos: A Parody of Truth (1948), Alfau faded from view, although Chromos was later nominated for a National Book Award in 1990. Dalkey Archive Press reissued Locos in 1989, publishing Chromos and a collection of his poetry three years later.

The structure of Locos, in which characters’ names change as they intrude on one another’s dramas, gives the book a dreamlike, surreal texture. Like Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which related characters have an unstoppable need to have their story articulated by the writer, Alfau’s creations step out of the action to comment on or even attempt to redirect events. Critics have further compared Alfau’s book to the works of Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jorge Luís Borges, who share similar qualities of Magical Realism and postmodernism. Locos also resembles Flan O’Brien’s At Swim-Two Birds (1939), which also employs a story-within-a-story structure. Two facts make Locos a phenomenon unto itself: None of these writers appears to have had any knowledge of Alfau’s anachronistic stories, and a half century of obscurity elapsed before the book was republished to greater acclaim than had met its original printing.

In Chromos, a fictionalized Alfau gazes by matchlight at old pictures from a Spanish calendar. He imagines a novel about the same characters as those in Locos, living lives quite separate from that of their adopted home, Manhattan. This ability to write of separation from the outside world has finally earned Alfau a long overdue reputation as a complex and clever storyteller.

Bibliography

Alfau, Felipe. “Anonymity: An Interview with Felipe Alfau.” Interview by Ilan Stavans. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 1 (Spring, 1993): 146-153. A revealing talk with the author in which he discusses his philosophy, politics, and life as a writer. Provides a telling glance into Alfau’s wry sense of humor.

Dirda, Michael. “Crazy Like a Fox.” The Washington Post Book World 19, no. 17 (April 23, 1989). Along with a detailed review of Locos, Dirda also provides some background on Felipe Alfau and puts the novel into literary context.

McCarthy, Mary. Afterword to Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, by Felipe Alfau. Elmwood Park, Ill.: The Dalkey Archive Press, 1988. An unabashed fan of Alfau, McCarthy revisits Locos, having originally reviewed the book in 1936 for The Nation. She also helps in untangling some complex plot points.

Shapiro, Anna. “Sixty-one Years of Solitude.” The New Yorker 65 (June 5, 1989): 105-108. A luminous review of Locos, along with a succinct overview of Alfau’s life.

Stavans, Ilan. Introduction to Sentimental Songs, by Felipe Alfau. Elmwood, Ill.: The Dalkey Archive Press. 1992. Stavans, who also interviewed Alfau in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, provides contextual information on Alfau’s work, including his relationship to the Romantic movement.