Farewell,
My Lovely es una novela de Raymond Chandler, quien la escribió en
1940. Farewell … es la segunda novela
que muestra al detective privado Philip Marlow.
IT WAS ONE OF
THE MIXED BLOCKS over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro.
I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a
relief barber named Dimitrios Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter.
His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home.
I never found
him, but Mrs. Aleidis never paid me any money either.
It was a warm
day, almost the end of March, and I stood outside the barber shop looking up at
the extended neon sign of a second floor dine and dice emporium called
Florian’s. A man was looking up at the sign too. He was looking up at the dusty
windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a muscular immigrant
catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty. He was a big man but not
more than 1, 95 meters tall and not
wider than a beer truck. He was about 3 meters
away from me. His arms hung loose at his aides and a forgotten cigar smoked
behind his enormous fingers.
Slim quiet
Negroes passed up and down the street and stared at him with darting side
glances. He was worth looking at. He wore an untidy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it
for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel trousers and
alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket
cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There
were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he
didn’t really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed
street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice
of angel food.
His skin was
pale and he needed a shave. He would always need a shave. He had curly black
hair and heavy eyebrows that almost met over his thick nose. His ears were
small and neat for a man of that size and his eyes had a shine close to tears
that gray eyes often seem to have. He stood like a statue, and after a long
time he smiled.
He moved slowly
across the sidewalk to the double swinging doors which shut off the stairs to
the second floor. He pushed them open, cast a cool expressionless glance up and
down the street, and moved inside. If he had been a smaller man and more
quietly dressed, I might have thought he was going to commit a robbery. But not
in those clothes, and not with that hat, and that frame.
The doors swung
back outwards and almost settled to a stop. Before they had entirely stopped
moving they opened again, violently, outwards. Something sailed across the
sidewalk and landed in the gutter between two parked cars. It landed on its
hands and knees and made a high keening noise like a cornered rat. It got up
slowly, retrieved a hat and stepped back onto the sidewalk. It was a thin,
narrow-shouldered brown youth in a lilac colored suit and a carnation. It had smooth
black hair. It kept its mouth open and complained for a moment. People stared
at it vaguely. Then it settled its hat cheerfully, moved over to the wall and
walked silently splay-footed off along the block.
Silence. Traffic
resumed. I walked along to the double doors and stood in front of them. They
were motionless now. It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed them open and
looked in.
A hand I could
have sat in came out of the dimness and took hold of my shoulder and compressed
it to a pulp. Then the hand moved me through the doors and casually lifted me
up a step. The large face looked at me. A deep soft voice said to me, quietly:
“Smokes in here,
huh? Tie that for me, pal.”
It was dark in
there. It was quiet. From up above came vague sounds of humanity, but we were
alone on the stairs. The big man stared at me solemnly and went on wrecking my
shoulder with his hand.
“A dinge,” he said. “I just thrown him
out. You seen me throw him out?”
He let go of my
shoulder. The bone didn’t seem to be broken, but the arm was numb.
“It’s that kind of a place,” I said, rubbing my
shoulder. “What did you expect?”
“Don’t say that, pal,” the big man murmured softly,
like four tigers after dinner. “Velma used to work here. Little Velma.”
He reached for my shoulder again. I tried to evade him
but he was as fast as a cat. He began to chew my muscles up some more with his
iron fingers.
“Yeah,” he said. “Little Velma. I ain’t seen her in
eight years. You say this here is a dinge joint?”
I said that it was… (Excerpts from Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond
Chandler)
Vocabulario
Borsalino: nombre de
una compañía de sombreros conocida por sus fedoras. Se estableció en 1857.
splay-footed: pies
vueltos hacia afuera.
dinge: una persona
negra.
Recursos
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