Luis Moreno ate his own shoes—both of them. It wasn’t as if he was adrift on an ocean, alone in an uncovered boat, driven half mad from drinking brine and from the radiation of the sun beating down relentlessly upon him, with no food but his shoes—in other words a desperate act for survival. It wasn’t that, although he might have felt it was.
 
Mr Moreno lived downtown. He was an office worker of scant importance to his employer, meaning that he could easily be replaced. This is exactly what happened the day he arrived at work in his socks. He offered no explanation. It was a silence almost as perverse as the contents of his strange meal. But nothing was known about that, and he quietly left just as he had arrived—shoeless. It was raining.
 
Moreno had determination, cutting strips of shoe leather and boiling them until they were chewable, grating the heels and eating them by the spoonful. The soles had been a challenge. It had taken six weeks.
 
“Nothing comes from nowhere” his father used to say. It was one of those many platitudes to which he was prone. To Luis as a boy they had always seemed to hold some undefined wisdom. From the vantage point of adulthood, he had come to think that these banalities were an unconscious attempt to grasp at meaning.
 
His father had spent his life working as a cobbler, as had his grandfather before him. Not so Luis. On account of his mother's machinations with the church, he had been enrolled as a medical student in Madrid but he never became a doctor. He dropped out soon after starting. By the time he was twenty-five he was looking for a way to leave Spain. His short time as a student was spent associating with poets, painters and philosophers. It was a brief experience with lasting consequences.
 
Nothing came from nowhere, so everything must have come from somewhere. Over breakfast one morning in Madrid, he had set fire to his hair with a cigarette lighter. Already in his youth he displayed a penchant for impulsive acts but none of them were what they seemed. He had planned the hair burning for months, waiting for the quiff that swung across his forehead to grow long enough to be worth setting ablaze. Even the day had been carefully chosen, taking into consideration the people who would be present and their likely states of mind. It was a gathering of friends, all of them hungover from the previous night, including Luis. He suddenly roused them from their torpor by flicking his lighter and burning off his quiff—a part of his anatomy of which he was quite proud. It disappeared within seconds and never grew back the same way. His friends were all delightfully shocked. Luis had a wicked sense of humour. He was obviously one of those people—those surrealists.
 
They laughed again when Luis collapsed on the street outside the café, and rolled around cupping his hands together. They laughed until they realized he was having a seizure. He had three such incidents over the next few months and then nothing thereafter, although he never knew what to expect and always avoided looking directly at shining objects or reflections. Each time he lost consciousness he woke to find himself walking in a densely forested landscape. He would wander for hours, never seeing another living creature, until he came to a few seconds later.
 
Luis Moreno left Spain in 1935, not long before the outbreak of the civil war. The rest of his family stayed behind, aligning themselves with the Republicans. He went first to Paris, then to London and finally to New York where he stayed. There were a number of expatriate Spanish artists living in Paris at the time and soon he had crossed paths with most of them. Through them he had a brush with surrealism but he was disappointed. Though left-leaning himself, he didn’t like the way their pettifogging and political bickering had ruptured the movement he admired. The surrealists he met didn’t think much of the shy Spaniard beyond his occasional, interesting outbursts of extreme extroversion. He didn’t do anything. He didn’t write, or paint, or make films. He planned extensively of course, but that wasn’t apparent to them and even if it had been, they probably would not have approved.
 
He had a tenacity that reminded him of vindictiveness, the same doggedness as someone who waits years to avenge a slight. But there the similarity ceased. There was nothing particularly malicious about him. He just liked to make plans. That meant he spent a lot of time daydreaming in exquisite detail. It was a conceptual art, not for the purpose of his own gain, though not excluding it either. He understood that movements in art, like fashion, were defined by their times. Surrealism would have its day, and when that day was over, its capacity to shock would dwindle into the mainstream. Even British monarchs would one day have surrealist paintings in their royal collection. The movement would become history and its value would increase. To that end, he bought paintings from unknown artists with promise whenever he could. In New York he bought several from the young, yet-to-be famous Jackson Pollock. Luis wasn’t constrained by time because he moved with it. He knew he would have a source of income in the future.
 
When he first arrived in New York, he made money by giving Spanish lessons. His students were mostly from the affluent classes and most of them were women. He had been helped by his friend René Duval, a French art dealer with connections in New York. René made it his business to know wealthy people. They had met in Paris, and it was on René’s urging that he had decided to come to America. He helped Luis find a small apartment on 14th Street, lent him some money to get him started, and suggested he give lessons to support himself. He even found him his first clients. Despite his arduous social climbing, René was generous and without him Luis would have had much more difficulty establishing himself. By this time he was almost fluent in English, albeit with a thick accent, which charmed his female students. He had a knack for languages.
 
René later became very successful and it was to him Luis turned when it became time to sell his paintings. But that was much later. They remained lifelong friends. René was one of the few people who was able to recognize the kind of artist he was. Luis even spoke to him about his shoe-eating idea, which René considered vaguely Oedipal, though he didn’t disapprove.
 
The idea had first come to him when he saw the shoe-shine men at Grand Central station. Among the throngs of passengers, he came across rough-hewn thrones in which men reclined and had their shoes polished by other men who squatted, or sat on small stools at their feet. It wasn’t the obvious social implication that caught his eye but the proximity of head to feet. These were usually extremities, as far apart on a body as anything could be. In this case they were not. It didn’t matter that there were more bodies than one. The idea was the same, or at least had the same effect on him. It came to him unformulated, as an inchoate mist that hung in his brain. In his usual fashion he gradually sculpted it, constantly adapting it as situations changed, carefully filling in details as if colouring a drawing, until it led years later to the day when he ate his shoes and sold his paintings.
 
One of his first students was Sabrina Gibbs. She was the youngest of two daughters from a wealthy and cloyingly controlling family. She soon found herself in a romantic relationship with Luis. She had artistic aspirations and a natural talent as a painter, and no need to work. In fact she was not expected to work, just to get married to a suitable bachelor. She found these expectations to be a crushing burden, so contrary to her nature. Her parents tolerated her Spanish lessons with some suspicion. Perhaps it was an act of rebellion that attracted her to Luis, along with his dark and lavish good looks, or it might have been his bohemian lifestyle that drew her to him. When she first came to his apartment, she was impressed by its utilitarian sparseness. He had barely no more than a bed to sleep in, with paintings leaning haphazardly against the walls. He only had one suit of clothes that he cleaned meticulously with a damp cloth. He seemed to be completely unconcerned with all the things that her parents obsessed about. It was exciting and liberating. Such a life was possible.
 
When she announced a few months later that they were engaged to be married there was a volcanic eruption within the family. The Spanish lessons were immediately discontinued. The pleasant but oily René Duval, who had introduced them, was no longer welcome in the house. She was threatened with disinheritance. A European trip would have been in order, had it not been for the worsening situation on that continent.
 
Before her parents could do anything rash, Sabrina and Luis were secretly married at City Hall. They picked up some cheap rings on the way there, which she paid for. Afterwards they had a small party with a group of friends at the apartment on 14th Street. René had filled the bathtub with ice and bottles of champagne. It was a good start to a new life.
 
Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent to her that the marriage was not going to work. She began to see a side of Luis that she had been unaware of before—he seemed completely unmotivated, lying for hours each day on his bed staring up at the ceiling and not responding when she spoke to him. At first she let him be and went about her painting but as the months passed it bothered her more and more. He was cold and remote, obviously so used to living alone that he was unable to share his life with anyone. Selfish really. The thought of spending years like this, going nowhere, became unbearable to her. Of course she didn’t understand that when he was lying motionless on the bed he was involved in acts just as creative as she was when painting. He never told her. He also never spoke to her of his thoughts about the relationship between truth and belief. He was of the opinion that no one saw ghosts unless they believed in them. Or inversely, if you saw a dog crossing the road in front of you, you saw it because you believed in the existence of dogs. In other words, reality was partly a judgement based on its perception. He was aware of her growing disappointment in him and recognized the truth of what she thought in relation to her belief but he did nothing and let it play out, as he felt that all people were entitled to their beliefs.
 
The final straw was when he took a second-rate job, as far as she was concerned, in the mailroom at the Steinway piano factory in Astoria. She tried to talk him out of it but he was adamant. She packed her bags and left.
 
That first night without her he dreamed of three rectangles, nested inside each other and viewed from above against a field of blackness. He felt it should be important but could never make any sense of it.
 
As much as he was depressed about the collapse of his marriage, Sabrina’s parents were overjoyed. They helped her get a divorce and her inheritance was restored. They wrote the whole thing off as youthful folly from a girl who was too headstrong for her own good. Luckily there were no children.
 
Contrary to Sabrina’s beliefs, Luis was perfectly capable of applying himself. He had come to the conclusion that a second-rate job was exactly what he needed. Once the decision was made, he acted on it promptly. He wanted a job that paid enough for his modest needs but not enough for the temptation of wealth to distract him. It had to have minimal prospects of advancement, limited responsibility, and be easy to do. It should be far enough away from where he lived to reduce the possibility of social interactions with his co-workers. He wanted to fulfil his duties without forming emotional attachments. He wanted a job he could easily walk away from—in his socks. The mailroom at Steinway & Sons fitted those criteria. Aside from any unforeseen events, he planned to eat his shoes in about twenty years. After that he would wait until Franco died, and return to Spain.
 
Those occasional extreme outbursts that had intrigued the surrealists in Paris were not as unconscious as they had imagined. He used them as a means to release the tension caused by holding innumerable details in his mind over long periods of time. While he was in New York he refrained from such activity as he did not want to jeopardize his immigrant status.
 
So he went to work in his boring job and stayed there for many years. He was always punctual, responsible, efficient and personable. He was liked well enough but not well liked, as no one was ever able to get to know him and could never understand why. He remained a mystery who was not thought about too much—just as he wanted. He used his first pay check to buy a pair of Italian shoes. He had done some research and found that these would be the most suitable to eat as the leather was relatively thin and he liked their style.
 
On the fateful day he got up, threw away his remaining shoes, the ones he hadn’t eaten— just two pairs, chewed the last strip of leather he had been saving for that day, followed by a slice of toast, and then went to work.
 
When it was noticed that he wasn’t wearing any shoes, there was great surprise and consternation in the mailroom. It was so unexpected and out of character. He didn’t bat an eyelid and carried on as usual as his colleagues gave him sidelong glances and muttered among themselves. Finally he was summoned to his supervisor’s office. Mr Clifford came around to the front of his desk as he entered.
 
“What happened to your shoes, Moreno?”
 
Luis felt a huge sense of relief well up inside him. He was beginning to enjoy himself. He had nothing to lose. He didn’t reply, just shrugged and stared down at his feet. There was a small hole in his right sock through which his big toe was slightly visible.
 
“Are you alright? Do you need medical attention?”
 
“No thank you. I am very well. How are you?”
 
“You can’t work here without proper attire. You should know that.”
 
“Yes sir.”
 
Mr Clifford was perplexed. Luis could sense him searching for the way out of an inexplicable situation.
 
“You’ve been with us for years. What’s going on?”
 
Luis shrugged again, in a particularly Spanish way. He could see that Clifford had made up his mind.
 
“I see. Well, I don’t know what’s come over you but you are relieved of your duties as of now. Go home. Get some help.”
 
Luis slipped out of the factory. He walked the streets in the rain and took the subway, all the time enjoying the embarrassed attention he received. People looked, then looked away, then looked again, and then turned away as he met their eye. It couldn’t be better. The perfect culmination to twenty years of work. He was euphoric.
 
As he made his way to René’s apartment on 57th Street to discuss the sale of the paintings, which was already pending, his whole body tingled with satisfaction. The weight of the last twenty, even thirty years had been lifted from him and he felt as if he might float away. The idea had come to him in New York, though he had been reaching for it ever since he left medical school. Now his work was done and he had earned his freedom. These days artists seemed to think that they had to keep cranking out work, probably because of the way the art world had evolved into the economy. To him they were missing the point and the depth of their creations diminished accordingly. He had always believed that an artwork should take a lifetime to produce. Quantity was not in the same league as quality.
 
The doorman at René’s building did not seem to be at all concerned with his lack of footwear. Luis climbed the four flights of stairs and rang the bell. The door opened revealing René in a silk smoking jacket, a cigar clenched in his jaw. He looked down.
 
“I see you’ve finally eaten your shoes. Congratulations. We should celebrate.”
 
 
© Tom Newton 2019
 
Mr. Moreno's Shoes is a story from the collection Seven Cries of Delight, Recital Publishing 2019.
 
For more information about this book, go to recital publishing.com »