El Toro

CHAPTER IX

Eastward lay La Gloria, Del Tuerto, De Caballete. Three mountains, like any other mountains, sticking into the clouds. Three mountains, below which lay Sancti Spiritus. Like Mohammed, the mountains had it on us. They would not come to us; we would have to go to them. The mountains were not visible in the morning, but the planter said they were there. We asked him where was Sancti Spiritus, and he said to go to the mountains. We asked him how far was Sancti Spiritus, and he shook his head. We started for the mountains, determined to reach Sancti Spiritus that day regardless of conditions, distance, or direction.

The same old acts were rehearsed with new scenery. Down gullies we twisted to wide rivers, forded them and scrambled up the banks, only to drop again into marsh or perform on the high spots over ruts that the rain could not wash out, but which it made slippery beyond description. We did a lot of driving through fields. Where there were fences, they were either of stone or barbed wire. The latter consisted of two or three loosely drawn strands of wire, held by an occasional permanent post, but, principally, by loose sticks. We cut the wires with pliers, dropped the fence, drove into the field, picked up the fence, joined its loose ends as best we could and drove on. In order to go a mile or two we sometimes had to pass through a dozen fields and cut a dozen fences. The fields which we preferred to the trail were either plowed ground or simply rough land which never had been tilled. Always, it was covered with stones and it was never level.

Through the beating rain we rose to the top of the ridge which had framed our view, and saw, behind us, laid out as on a map, the last river we had forded and, in front of us, the next one we would have to ford. Away over at the right, sharp-nosed Pico Tuerto jutted skyward from between its squatter brothers, Caballete and Gloria. Each successive hill became higher. Each was flat topped like a small plateau. Between them were swamps.

A loquacious dissembler at a small town said that a macadam road, a relic of early Spanish days, started at the next hill and ran straight to Sancti Spiritus. With tire chains broken and breaking, as they were dragged over the scraggy roads, climb after climb, descent after descent, we kept at it, in the pouring rain, looking for that road just at the top of the next hill. It was like trying to catch up with to-morrow. Sancti Spiritus was near. We knew that, but night was getting nearer. We fretted at delay and took unusual chances on the hills. Sancti Spiritus assumed the aspect of a myth.

About the time we had given up hope for the day, we found a bridge and then another, and, at last, we found the promised highway. It was worn and full of holes, but it was high, hard, and almost level. The clouds parted and the sun beamed a bright farewell, just before it dropped from sight behind the mountains. High on a neighboring crest was silhouetted against the glowing, copper-colored sky a lone block house. Below it, between a pair of spreading laurels, stood the ruins of a great mansion which had been the quarters of some luckless Spanish general who allowed the Cubans to shoot him out of house and home. A massive stone bridge, weathered by the many years throughout which it had served generation after generation, led us over the last river. We climbed the last hill. Below us spread the red roofs of Sancti Spiritus.

The town received us boisterously. Each crooked street filled with noisy crowds of men, women, and children, who darted from their homes to chase after us to the hotel, even as though there was nothing else in Sancti Spiritus to think of that evening. Sancti Spiritus was innocent in automobiles, but it had heard of us. By mail had come the Santa Clara paper, telling about the Americans in the automobile which was named El Toro.

In the immense bedroom of the ancient hotel, while we waited for water to be brought that we might wash, we sat on the edges of the canopied beds, looked at each other, and merely laughed. There was something ridiculous in being there. The adventure was over. We had come to the mountains.

Why? Because.

The story of Saturday, loitered away in this peculiar and venerable town, is another story. Dressed in odds and ends of garments picked up at the local stores, to replace the mud-covered, tattered clothes we had worn continuously for a week and a half, we strayed around its crooked streets, posed in the plaza that the wondering children might gaze upon us, and lounged in the hotel courtyard among the flowers. Across the corner from the plaza stands the oldest cathedral in Cuba, weatherbeaten, but proudly rising over the low tiled houses of the town. It represents a civilization and an art which is wasted on the reconstructed Cuban. The latter has no apparent reverence for the picturesque architecture and the quaint religious figures housed within its crumbling walls.

The Supreme Being of that vicinity was Captain Wise. His headquarters were on a hill overlooking the town, and he commanded a company of United States marines, who had built comfortable quarters and spent their time going through the motions of military life, playing baseball and performing the duties of an army of pacification in charge of a lot of scrappy islanders, who, from el Señor Alcalde to el peon, were, after all, nothing but spiggoties in the eyes of an American private soldier.

It was good to be among these child-like American boys. We had done a little fighting ourselves, of a different kind. We had gone through districts where all Cuba said we could not go. We had accomplished the impossible and were satisfied. Mingled with our pride, however, was a new respect for these greatest of soldiers, and, like them, having done what we had come to do, we wanted to go home. There was a little bit of extra sentiment that night, with all of the Americans in the place gathered at headquarters, waiting for retreat to sound, when, under La Gloria’s shadow, at the sinking of the sun, the stars-and-stripes dropped upon the blood-red soil of new-old Cuba.

Now for the anti-climax, for it is an anti-climax to load an automobile onto a flat car, in the darkness which shrouds such a town as Sancti Spiritus. It is an anti-climax to be dragged away at dawn by a wheezy engine over the wabbly, rusted tracks of a stray branch railway. It is an anti-climax to sit at a wayside station like Zaza del Medio, waiting for the daily train to Havana, that gay decoy which draws tourists to Cuba. It is an anti-climax, after one has come hundreds of miles in an automobile over land which no vehicle was ever meant to traverse, and, then, at the sight of a fussing, careening sample of a railway train, to dig deep into your pockets for the wherewithal to purchase a mere ticket. We had left on hand little of the coin of the realm—any old realm, Spanish or American. So, trying to forget who and when and where we came from, we gave up our little mite for seats in the second-class carriage.

All night we sat in frozen silence by the open windows, eying in tired disgust the dirty black Cubans who shared our torture. We had not come for this, but now we realized what we had come for. We had come to make good on the roadless wastes. This railway coach was not Cuba; the Cuba we knew was over at Casa Cinco, where the pig pens have mezzanine floors and serve as hotels. We were going back to Havana. Havana was not Cuba; Cuba was at the top of the Santa Fe mountains, where the rain washes the traveler’s hopes down the hillside and leaves him staring into the dark, cold night, speculating on the whereabouts of Camajuani.

Trundling along behind, on a flat car, was an automobile. It was more than an automobile, as it had an identity of its own. It was El Toro. There were no other Packards like it. It had done more than we had done, for we simply had given it a chance. We simply were engineers in traction. We had found a path. Surely the Cubans had named it right, when they called it The Bull.

In the morning we would find Havana, money, new clothes, passage to the United States and the frozen north from whence we had come.

What of it?

You can’t railroad memory. Technically, we were leaving Cuba. In reality, we stayed; stayed there where our recollections were and where we had learned the greatness of a philosophy which makes a man do things—just because. Some day we are going back, we hope. Some day, when the new government has spent its thirty millions of dollars and built its many highways. We are going back to rush over the country in El Toro; to dash, in reckless flight, by the same places where we struggled up the hills inch by inch.

Why? Just because.