The Project Gutenberg eBook of San Cristóbal de la Habana
Title: San Cristóbal de la Habana
Author: Joseph Hergesheimer
Release date: December 30, 2011 [eBook #38445]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
SAN CRISTÓBAL
DE LA HABANA
THE WORKS OF
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
NOVELS
- THE LAY ANTHONY [1914]
- MOUNTAIN BLOOD [1915]
- THE THREE BLACK PENNYS [1917]
- JAVA HEAD [1918]
- LINDA CONDON [1919]
SHORTER STORIES
- GOLD AND IRON [1918]
- THE HAPPY END [1919]
TRAVEL
- SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA HABANA
Published in New York by
A L F R E D A. K N O P F
and for sale at all bookshops
SAN CRISTÓBAL
DE LA HABANA
BY
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
"Many yeeres since I had knowledge by
relation of that great and golden Citie
which the Spaniards call El Dorado."
Sir Walter Ralegh
NEW YORK
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
H. J. B. BAIRD
An
Havana
which he is free
to decline in every particular
save the
dedication
SAN CRISTÓBAL
DE LA HABANA
THERE are certain cities, strange to the first view, nearer the heart than home. But it might be better to acknowledge that, perhaps, the word home has a wider and deeper significance than any mere geographical and family setting. Many men are alien in houses built from the traditions of their blood; the most inaccessible and obdurate parts of the earth have always been restlessly sought by individuals driven not so much by exterior pressure as by a strange necessity to inhabit a barren copper mountain, a fever coast, or follow to the end of life a river lost in a savage remoteness, hiding the secret of their unquenchable longing.
Not this, precisely, happened to me, approaching Havana in the early morning, nothing so tyrannical and absolute; yet, watching the silver greenness of Cuba rising from the blue sea, I had a premonition that what I saw was of peculiar importance to me. I grew at once impatient and sharply intent on the resolving of a nebulous, and verdant mass into the details of dense slopes, slopes that showed, from the sea to their crowns, no break in a dark foliage. The sombreness of the leaves immediately marked the land from an accustomed region of bright maples—they were at once dark, glossy, and heavy, an effect I had often tried to describe, and their presence in such utter expanses filled me with pleasure. It was exactly as though the smooth lustrous hills before me had been created out of an old mysterious desire to realize them in words.
Undoubtedly their effect belonged to the sea, the sky, and the hour in which they were set. The plane of the sea, ruffled by a wind like a willful and contrarily exerted force, was so blue that its color was lost in the dark intensity of tone; while the veils of space were dissolved in arcs of expanding light. The island seemed unusually solid and isolated, as complete within itself as a flower in air, and saturated with romance. That was my immediate feeling about Cuba, taking on depth across water profounder than indigo ... it was latent with the emotional distinction which so signally stirred me to write.
At once, in imagination, I saw the ineffable bay of Guatanago, where buccaneers careened their ships and, in a town of pink stucco and windows with projecting wooden grilles, drank and took for figureheads the sacred images of churches painted blue. On the shore, under a canopy of silk, a woman, naked but for a twist of bishop's purple, bound her hair in gold cloth. From where she stood, in dyed shadow, a figure only less golden than the cloth, she heard the hollow ring of the caulking malls and the harsh rustle of the palms. Drawing rapidly nearer to what was evidently the entrance to the harbor of Havana I considered the possibilities of such a story, such a character:
She had her existence in the seventeenth century, when Morgan marched inland to rape Camagüey—the daughter, without doubt, of a captain of the Armada de Barlevento, the Windward Fleet, and a native woman taken in violence; a shameless wench with primitive feelings enormously complicated by the heritage of Spain's civilization, a murderous, sullen, passionate jade, wholly treacherous and instinct with ferine curiosity. The master for her, I decided, must come from the Court of Charles, the London of the Cavalier Parliament, a gentleman in a gay foppery masking a steel eaten by a cruelty like a secret poison. It would be a story bright with the flames of hell and violent as a hurricane; the pages would reflect the glare of the sand scrawled with cocoanut palms, and banked with mangroves; and, at the end, the bishop's purple would be a cerecloth and the gallows chains sound in Xaymaca. But, above everything else, it would be modern in psychology and color treatment, written with that realism for which the only excuse was to provide a more exact verisimilitude for romance.
The Cuban shore was now so close, Havana so imminent, that I lost my story in a new interest. I could see low against the water a line of white buildings, at that distance purely classic in implication. Then it was that I had my first premonition about the city toward which I was smoothly progressing—I was to find in it the classic spirit not of Greece but of a late period; it was the replica of those imagined cities painted and engraved in a wealth of marble cornices and set directly against the tranquil sea. There was already perceptible about it the air of unreality that marked the strand which saw the Embarkation for Cytherea.
Nothing could have made me happier than this realization; an extension of the impression of a haunting dream turned into solid fact. The buildings multiplied to the sight, bathed in a glamorous radiance; and, suddenly, on the other hand, rose Morro Castle. That structure, small and compact and remarkably like its numerous pictures, gave me a distinct feeling of disappointment. Its importance was historic rather than visible, and needed, for appreciation, a different mind from mine. But the narrowness of the harbor entrance, a deep thrust of blue extending crookedly into the land, the sense of crowded shipping and massed city, the steamers of the world and broad shaded avenues at my elbow, impressed me at once with Havana's unique personality.
Nothing, however, was more ingratiating than the long coraline limestone wall of the Cabañas on its sere abrupt hill at the left; ponderous and stained brilliantly pink by time, it formed a miraculous complement to the pseudo-classic whiteness below. A sea-wall built into a wide promenade followed the shore, there was a circular pavilion on a flagged plaza piled with iron chairs, the docks were interspersed with small public gardens under royal palms, and everywhere the high windows had ornamental balconies empty in the morning sun. I heard, then, the voice of Havana, a remarkably active staccato voice, never, I was to learn, sinking to quiet, but changing at night into a different yet no less disturbing clamor.
What I tried to discover, rushed through broad avenues and streets hardly more than passageways, was the special characteristic of a city which had already possessed me. And, ignorant of the instantaneous process that formed the words, I told myself that it was a mid-Victorian Pompeii. This was a modification of my first impression, a truer approximation, for it expressed the totality of marble façades inadmissible architecturally, yet together holding a surprising and pleasant unity. No one, I thought excitedly, had ever rightly appreciated Havana; it required a very involved understanding, a feeling not entirely admirable. No, it wasn't Hellenic, not what might be called in the first manner; it hadn't the simplicity of great spirit, a true epoch; Havana was artificial, exotic: Spain touched everywhere by the tropics, the tropics—without a tradition—built into a semblance of the baroque.
It was rococo, and I liked it; an admission, I believe, laying me open to certain charges; for the rococo was universally damned; the Victorian period had been equally condemned ... and I liked it. Why, God knew! Ornament without use, without reference to its surface and purpose, invited contempt. A woman in a hoop skirt was an absurdity; black walnut furniture carved and gilded beyond recognition, nonsense. Yet they had my warm attachment. Havana claimed me for its own—a city where I could sit at tables in the open and gaze at parterres of flowers and palms and statues and fountains, where, in the evening, a band played the light arias of La Belle Hélène.
* * *
To illustrate further the perversity of my impulses: I was so entirely captivated by the Hotel Inglaterra that, for the rest of the day, I was indifferent to whatever might be waiting outside. The deep entrance with its reflected planes of subdued light and servants in cool linen; the patio with water, its white arches on iridescent tiles; the dining-room laid in marble, panelled with the arms of Pontius Pilate, the bronze lustre of the tiling and the long windows on the Parque exactly as I had anticipated, together created the happy effect of a bizarre domain. The corridor on which my room opened was still more entrancing, its arches filled with green latticework, and an octagonal space set with chairs and long-bladed plants.
Yet the room itself, perhaps one of the most remarkable rooms in the world, easily surpassed what, until then, I had seen. There were slatted door screens, cream-colored with a sapphire-blue glass knob, topped in an elaborate Gothic scrolling; and the door beyond, inconceivably tall, opened on an interior that seemed to reach upward without any limit. It had, of course, a ceiling, heavily beamed in dark wood; and when, later, I speculated carefully on its height, I reached the conclusion that it was twenty-five feet above the grey-flowered tiling of the floor. The walls were bare, white; about their base was laid a line of green glazed tiles; and this, except for the glass above the French window, was the only positive note.
The window, too, towered with the dignity of an impressive entrance; there were two sets of shutters, the inner elaborately slatted; and over it was a semi-circular fanlight of intensely brilliant colors—carmine and orange and plum-purple, cobalt and yellow. It was extraordinarily vivid, like heaped gorgeous fruit: throughout the day it dominated the closed elusive interior; and not only from its place on high, for the sun, moving across that exposure, cast its exact replica on the floor, over the frigidity of the austere iron bed, down one wall and up another.
It was fascinating merely to sit and watch that chromatic splash, the violent color, shift with the afternoon, to surrender the mind to its suggestions.... They, as well, were singularly bright and illogical. Such glass, such colors, had been discarded from present decorative schemes; but I recalled hints of them in the houses of eighteen seventy; I seemed to remember them in pagoda-like conservatories, and at once a memory of my childhood returned. Not that there were, actually, such windows at Woodnest, sombre under the tulip-poplars; yet the impression of one re-created the feeling of the other, it brought back disturbingly a vanished time with its figures long dead.
Havana was identified as an authentic part of my inheritance. I was—in a purely inner manner—to understand it, to have for it the affectionate recognition, the sense of familiarity, of which I have already spoken. The city was wholly expressed by the fanlight sparkling with the shifting radiance of the blazing day. It was possible, without leaving the room, to grasp the essential spirit of a place so largely unseen. Then it occurred to me that, indeed, I had seen Havana, and that the wisest thing to do was to leave at once, to go back with my strong feeling uncontaminated by trivial facts; but a more commonplace impulse, a limiting materialism, pointed out that, since I had come away for a change of scene, I had best realize a semblance of my intention. Still those colors, like a bouquet of translucent tulips, easily outweighed in importance all that I subsequently gained; they gave the emotional pitch, the intellectual note, of whatever followed—a mood, an entire existence, into which I walked with the turning of a sapphire-blue knob.
For the rest the furniture was scant—a walnut bureau with a long mirror, necessary chairs, and an adequate bathroom like a shaft with shining silver faucets at its bottom. From outside, even through the heat of noon, the sustained activity of sound floated up through the shutters—the incomplete blending of harsh traffic alarms and blurred cries announcing newspapers.
It was later when I went out on my balcony: across the narrow depth of San Rafael Street the ornamented bulk of the Gallego Club—the Club and the opera house in one—opposed a corner against the sweep of the Parque Central; and to the right, between the glitter of shop windows, poured an unbroken procession of motors. A great pillar of the paseo below was hung with gaily covered magazines; a bootblack, wrinkled and active, with a single chair on a high stand, was cleaning a row of white shoes, obviously from the hotel; and the newsboys were calling La Politica Comica in a long-drawn minor inflection.
The sun, that I had seen rising on the undiscovered hills of Cuba, was sinking behind the apprehended city; it touched the caryatids of the Gallego Club and enveloped, in a diminished gold like a fine suffusion of precious dust, the circular avenue, the royal palms, the flambeau trees and Indian laurels, of the plaza. The whiteness of the buildings, practically unbroken, everywhere took on the tone of every moment: now they were faintly aureate, as though they had been lightly touched by a gilder's brush; the diffused shadows were violet. The shadows slowly thickened and merged; they seemed to swell upward from the streets, the Parque; and the buildings, in turn, became lavender, and then, again, a glimmering white. Only the lifted green of the palms was changeless, positive, until it was lost in darkness.
A great many people appeared below, moving with an air of determination on definite ways. The faces of the men were darkened by the contrast of their linen; I couldn't see their features; but what struck me at once was the fact that there were, practically, no women along the streets. It was a tide of men. This, at first, gave me an impression of monotony, of stupidity—women were an absolute essential to the variety of any spectacle; and here, except for an occasional family group hurrying to a café, a rare stolid shape, they were utterly lacking.
The reason, however, quickly followed the observed truth; this was, in spirit, Spain, and Spain was saturated with Morocco, a land where women, even the poorest, were never publicly exhibited. Havana was a city of balconies, of barred windows, of houses impenetrable, blank, to the streets, but open on the garden rooms of patios. And suddenly—while the moment before I had been impatient at the bareness resulting from their absence—I was overwhelmingly conscious of the pervading influence of charming women. Here they were infinitely more appealing than in places where they were set out in the rows of a market, sometimes like flowers, but more often resembling turnips and squashes. Here, with extreme flattery, women were regarded as dangerous, as always desirable, and capable of folly.
It was a society where a camellia caught in the hair, a brilliant glance across a powdered cheek, lace drawn over a vivid mouth, were not for nothing. In the world from which I had come these gestures, beauties, existed; but they were general, and meaningless, rather than special—the expression of a conventional vanity without warmth. There was an agreement that any one might look, the intensest gaze was invited, with the understanding that almost none should desire; and a cloak of hypocrisy had been the result; either that or the beauty was mechanical, the gesture furtive and hard.
For Havana a woman was, in principle, a flower with delicate petals easily scattered, a perfume not to be rudely, indiscriminately, spent; a rose, it was the implication, had its moment, its perfection of eager flushed loveliness, during which what man would not reach out his hand? After that ... but the seed pods were carefully, jealously, tended. And here, in addition to so much else, was another shared attitude drawing me toward Havana—an enormous preference for women who had the courage of their emotions over those completely circumspect except in situations morally and financially solid.
* * *
My dressing for dinner I delayed luxuriously, smoking the last Dimitrino cigarette found in a pocket, and leaving the wet prints of my feet on the polished tiles of the floor. I was glad that I had brought a trunk, variously filled, in place of merely a bag, as I might have done; for it was evident that Havana required many changes of clothes. It was a city which to enjoy demanded a meticulous attention to trifles. For one thing it was going to be hot, April was well advanced; and the glorietas, the brightly illuminated open cafés, the thronged Prado and operatic Malecón, the general air of tropical expensiveness, insisted on the ornamental fitness of its idlers.
I debated comfortably the security of a dinner coat, slightly varied, perhaps, by white flannels; but in the end decided in favor of a more informal jacket of Chinese silk with the flannels. A shirt, the socks and scarf, were objects of separate importance; but when they were combined there was a prevailing shade of green.... I had no inclination to apologize for lingering over these details, but it might be necessary to warn the seekers after noble truisms that I had no part in their righteous purpose. Even noble truths, in their popular definitions, had never been a part of my concern: at the beginning I was hopelessly removed from them, and what was an instinct had become, in an experience of life not without supporting evidence, the firmest possible attitude. A tone of candor, if my reflections were to have the slightest interest or value, was my first necessity; and candor compelled me to admit that I thought seriously about the jacket which finally slipped smoothly over my shoulders.
It was an undeniable fact that I was newly in a land of enormous interest, which, just then, held the most significant and valuable crop growing on earth. But that didn't detain my imagination for a moment. The Havana that delighted me, into which I found myself so happily projected, was a city of promenading and posted theatre programmes, of dinners and drinks and fragrant cigars. I was aware that from such things I might, in the end, profit; but I'd get nothing, nothing in the world, from stereotyped sentiments and places and solemn gabbled information.
On top of this I had a fixed belief in the actual importance of, say, a necktie—for myself of course; I was not referring to the neckties of the novelists with a mission, lost in the dilemma of elevating mankind. A black string, or none at all, served their superiority. But for the light-minded the claim of a Bombay foulard against the solider shade of an Irish poplin was a delicate question; for the light-minded the choice of one word in preference to another—entirely beneath the plane of a mission—was a business for blood, an overt act. And with me there was a correspondence between the two, a personal exterior as nicely selected as possible and the mental attitude capable of exquisite choice in diction. But this was no more than a development of all that I first admitted, a repetition of my pleasure at being in Havana, a place where the election of a cocktail was invested with gravity. And, carefully finished except for the flower I'd get below, I was entirely in harmony with the envelopment, the adventure, to which my persistent good luck had brought me.
The elevator going down was burdened with expensive women, their bodies delicately evident under clinging fragile materials, their powdered throats hung with the clotted iridescence of pearls; the cage was filled with soft breathing and faint provocative perfumes—the special lure of flowers which nature had denied to them as women. It was, I told myself, all very reprehensible and delightful:
Here were creatures, anatomically planned for the sole end of maternity, who had wilfully, wisely I felt, elevated the mere preliminary of their purpose to the position of its whole consummation. More intoxicated by sheer charm than by the bearing of children, resentful of the thickened ankles of their immemorial duty, they proclaimed by every enhanced and seductive curve that their intention was magnetic rather than economic. They were, however, women of my own land, secure in that convention which permitted them exposure with immunity, and here; in Havana, they failed to interest me; their voices, too, were sharp, irritable; and even in the contracted space of the elevator their elaborate backs were so brutally turned on the men with them—men correct enough except for their studs—the hard feminine tyranny of the chivalrous United States was so starkly upheld, that I escaped with a sigh of relief into a totally different atmosphere.
The lower hall, the patio and dining-room on the left, were brilliant with life, the wing-like flutter of fans; and it would be necessary, I saw, to have my cocktail in the patio; but before that, following a purely instinctive course, I walked out to the paseo in front of the hotel. The white buildings beyond the dark foliage of the Parque were coruscant with electric signs, and, their utilitarian purpose masked in an unfamiliar language, they shared with the alabaster of the façades, the high fronds of the royal palms and the monument to Marti, in the tropical, the classic, romanticism.
Hardly had I appeared, gazing down the illuminated arcade, when a man approached me with a flat wide basket of flowers. There were, inevitably, roses, tea roses as pale as the yellow of champagne, gardenias, so smooth and white that they seemed unreal, heavy with odor; those I had expected, but what surprised me were some sprigs of orange blossom with an indefinite sweetness that was yet perceptible above the thicker scents. I chose the latter immediately, and the flower vendor, wholly comprehensive of my mood, placed the boutonnière in my jacket. The moment, now, had arrived for a Daiquiri: seated near the cool drip of the fountain, where a slight stir of air seemed to ruffle the fringed mantone of a bronze dancing Andalusian girl, I lingered over the frigid mixture of Ron Bacardi, sugar, and a fresh vivid green lime.
It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was to discover later at the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be sitting, at that hour in the Inglaterra, with such a drink. It elevated my contentment to an even higher pitch; and, with a detached amusement, I recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was formally in effect. Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent, for it held, in its shallow glass bowl slightly encrusted with undissolved sugar, the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it set the mind free of responsibility; obliterating both memory and to-morrow, it gave the heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and momentarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal, fears.
Yes, that was the danger of skilfully prepared intoxicating drinks.... The word intoxicating adequately expressed their power, their menace to orderly monotonous resignation. A word, I thought further, debased by moralists from its primary ecstatic content. Intoxication with Ron Bacardi, with May, with passion, was a state threatening to privilege, abhorrent to authority. And, since the dull were so fatally in the majority, they had succeeded in attaching a heavy penalty to whatever lay outside their lymphatic understanding. They had, as well, made the term gay an accusation before their Lord, confounding it with loose, so that now a gay girl—certainly the only girl worth a ribbon or the last devotion—was one bearing upon her graceful figure, for she was apt to be reprehensibly graceful, the censure of a society open to any charge other than that of gaiety in either of its meanings. A ridiculous, a tragic, conclusion, I told myself indifferently: but then, with a fresh Daiquiri and a sprig of orange blossoms in my buttonhole, it meant less than nothing. It grew cooler, and an augmented stir set in motion toward the dining-room, where the files of damask-spread tables held polished silver water-bottles and sugar in crystal jars with spouts.
* * *
The wisdom of the attention I had given to my appearance was at once evident in the table to which the head waiter conducted me. Small and reserved with a canted chair, it was directly at one of the long windows on the Parque Central. This, at first sight, on the part of its arbiter, would not have been merely an affair for money—he had his eye on the effect of the dining-room as a whole, as an expanse of the utmost decorative correctness, and there were a number of men with quite pretty women, a great asset publicly, who had been given places in the center of the room. Yes, where I was seated the ruffled curtains were swayed by the night breeze almost against my chair, a brilliant section of the plaza was directly at my shoulder, and I was pervaded by the essential feeling of having the best possible situation.
This was not, perhaps, true of characters more admirable than mine: but if I had been seated behind one of the pillars, buried in an obscure angle, my spirits would have suffered a sharp decline. I should have thought, temporarily, less of Havana, of myself, and of the world. The passionate interest in living, the sense of æsthetic security, that resulted in my turning continually to the inconceivable slavery of writing, would have been absent. But seated in one of the most desirable spots in existence, a dining-room of copper glazed tiles open on the tropics, about to begin a dinner with shrimps in the pink—the veritable rose—of perfection, while a head waiter, a triumph of intelligent sympathy, conferred with me on the delicate subject of wines, I felt equal to prose of matchless loveliness.
The dinner, finally, as good dinners were apt to be, was small, simple, with—the result of a prolonged consideration—a bottle of Marquis de Riscal. All the while the kaleidoscope of the Parque was revolving in patterns of bright yellows, silver, and indigo. Passersby were remarkably graphic and near: a short man with a severe expression and a thick grey beard suddenly appeared in the open window and demanded that I buy a whole lottery ticket; a sallow individual from without unfolded a bright glazed sheaf of unspeakably stupid American magazines; farther off, the crowd eddied through the lanes between the innumerable chairs drawn up companionably on the plaza. At a table close by, a family of Cubans were supplementing the courses of formal dining with an endless vivacious chatter, a warmth of interest charming to follow.
The father, stout, with an impressive moustache of which not one hair seemed uncounted or mislaid, regarded his short fat wife, his tall slim son, and his two entrancing daughters with an impartially active and affectionate attention. The girls were young, one perhaps fifteen and the other not more than a year or so older, though they both managed lorgnons with an ease and impertinent frankness that an older woman might well have envied, while they talked in rushes of vivid Spanish with an emphases of delectable shrugged shoulders, and, recognizing an acquaintance, exhibited smiles as dazzling as only youth knew. The boy, however, engaged me more strongly; a tone darker than the others, in repose his face, delicate in feature, was grave, reflective; his smooth black hair grew into a peak on his brow, his gaze was considerate, direct, and his mouth sensitive. Cuba, I thought, at its best; and here that was very good indeed. Any such degree of mingled dignity and the highly impressionable, of reserve and flexibility, was absent from the cruder young of the north.
He had, at the same time, an indefinable air of melancholy, a bearing that, while not devoid of pride, belonged to a minor people, to an island the ultimate fate of which—in a political word of singular faithlessness—was hidden in shadow. An affair of mere simple courage, of execution for an ideal by Spanish rifles in a Cabañas foss, he would have borne with brilliant success; he'd have ornamented charmingly the security of a great coffee estate in Pinar del Rio; it was possible that he might be distinguished in finance; but there was not back of him the sense of sheer weight, of ponderous land, that gave, for example, the chance young Englishman his conscious security, the American his slightly shrill material confidence.
This Cuban's particular quality, it seemed to me, belonged to the past, to an age when men wore jewelled buckles and aristocracy was an advantage rather than a misfortune. He had about him the graceful fatality now so bitterly attacked by the widening power of what was heroically referred to as the people. He represented, from the crown of his lustrous hair to his narrow correct dancing shoes, in his shapely hands and dark fine skin, privilege and sequestered gold. Outrages, I had heard, soon to be forever overthrown! It was possible that both the charges and the threatened remedy were actualities, and that privilege would disappear ... from one hand to another, and great lawns be cut up into cabbage patches and Empire ball-rooms converted into communal halls for village rancor.
Not much, in the way of benefit, could follow that. And women in starched linen collars, with starched theories of civic consciousness, would hardly be an improvement on fragrant memories of satin, moments of passion and frailty, and the beauty of tenderness. A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was immeasurably disastrous. All of this I saw reflected in the boy with peaked hair at the next table. He took a cigarette from a black silk case, and I was immediately reminded of my cigar.
It had been chosen with immense care in the Inglaterra café for bonbons and souvenirs, liqueurs and cigars. How remarkable it was, I had thought, hovering above the case, which contained a bewildering choice of shapes and colors, to be in a land where all the cigars were, in the sense I knew, imported. I hesitated for a minute or more between a Larrañaga and a banquet Corona, and finally decided on the former. It was as long as the cigar called Fancy Tales, but slightly thicker and rolled to a point at either end; and the first breath of its smoke, drifting in a blue cloud away from the window, told me that until then I had known but little of tobacco. Coffee so black that it stained the white shell of its cup; a diminutive glass of Grand Marnier, the distilled last saturation of oranges and fin champagne; and the Larrañaga, the color of oak leaves freshly brown, combined in a transcending magic of contentment.
The point was—my special inhibition as a traveler—that I didn't want to move; I had no wish to speak to anyone or see what, particularly, I should have hurried away to view. That impatience I had served when I was twenty-one, in Naples; a city uniquely planned for morbid and natural curiosity. There the animated frescoes of Pompeii had been posed, at two lire a figure, before my assumption of mature experience. But now, past forty, I was without the ambition and desire to follow the cabs of the American business men who, in the company of patient and fatigued Cubans, were, in the interest of vague appointments, bidding their families elaborate good evenings.
Later it was inevitable that I should get to the theatres, hear whatever music offered, and see all the dancing, Spanish and Cuban, in the city of Havana, but not to-night. My present pleasure was not to be wasted in the bother of movement and a probable mistake. The cigar continued to veil me in its reflective smoke for another half hour, there was more coffee in the pot. The tempered heat of the day lay over me like a spell, like an armor against the chill, the gaunt winds and rain, of the north. The scent of the sprig of orange blossoms was just perceptible, at once faint and laden with the potency of a magical grove.
* * *
The weather, the temperature and special atmospheric envelopment of Havana, was, I was certain, different from any other, its heat modified by the winds that moved across the island at night, at least from this shore, and the days flooded with an incandescent sunlight like burning magnesium. Stirring slowly about my room before breakfast, the slatted shutters bowed against the already blazing day, a thread of cigarette smoke climbing hopelessly toward the far ceiling, I thought of the idiotic popular conviction that the weather was a topic for stupid minds. The reverse, certainly, was true, since, inbound with all the settings of life, all nature, the weather offered an illimitable range of suggestion.
It had been the great discovery of imaginative prose—the novel for which we care most had been largely the result of that gained appreciation; and its absence in older books, placed in a vacuum, entirely accounted for their dry unreality. What, for instance, were the novels of Thomas Hardy but splendid records of the countryside weather, for nature and weather were one. This, more than any other force, conditioned men, stamping them out with an ice age, burning them black in Africa ... setting royal palms by the doors of the Hotel Inglaterra and willows along my lower lawn.
The difference between Havana and West Chester was exactly that difference in their foliage, in the low April green of one and the harsh high fronds of the other. The quality, the weather, that made the trees made equally the men, just as it dictated their lives, the houses they lived in, their industries and planted grains. This was true not only of the country but of the city, too, of George Moore as well as Hardy; for though Moore belonged principally to salons and the discreet interiors of broughams, a good half of the beauty of his pages was due to his response to the quality of spring against a smoke-blackened London wall, the laburnum blossoming in his Dublin garden.
The slightest impression of Havana must be founded on a sensitive recognition of the crystal light and printed shadows which, in addition to its architecture of fact, brought another of sweeping illusion. In the morning the plazas glittered in a complete revelation of every hard carving and leaf and painted kiosk, but later the detail merged in airy diagonal structures of shade. Modified, infrequently, by the gorgeous cumulous clouds drifting from the upward thrust, the anchorage, of the Andes, the entire process of the hours was upset. This was not simply a variation of inanimate surface, it had an exact counterpart in the emotions: bowed by an insuperable blaze or upright in the veiled sun, the attitude of harmony was profoundly affected. The night was altogether separate, a time, I gathered, when it seldom rained; and there was never another city that took advantage of the night like Havana. Released from the resplendent tyranny of the sun, everyone, it appeared, disdaining sleep, lingered in the plazas, the cafés, and along the sea-walls, until dawn threatened. Here the dark was not alone a stage for nocturnal plans and figures: it was without strangeness or fear for the Cubans thronging abroad, on foot and in motors, early and late. The whiteness of the buildings, too, even where they were not illuminated, defined spaces never obscure; the city was never wholly lost, obliterated by the imponderable blackness of the north. All this, every aspect of Havana's being, was the gift—the dangerous gift—of its situation, its weather. The blinding day, the city folded in a sparkling night, like a vision in blanched satin with fireflies in her hair, were nothing more than meteorological.
For myself, my entire attitude was different in the room I now inhabited from the inherent feeling, in New York, of the Algonquin. I was, in white flannels and brown Holland, with roses against the mirror of the bureau, another man; not only my mentality but my physical bearing was changed. Here I was an individual who, moving about for an hour or so in the morning, spent the day until late afternoon in some quiet and cool inner spaciousness. That, I appreciated at once, was one of the comfortable peculiarities of Havana: it was always possible to be cool—in a café with the marble floor sprinkled with water; at the entrance of the Inglaterra, where, however, the chairs were the most uncomfortable in the world; or, better yet, with a book, a naranjada, and pajamas, transiently at home.
For the iced refrescos of Cuba I had been prepared; and at breakfast, though that, I found later, was not its hour, I chose, rather than a naranjada, a piña colado—a glass, nearly as large and quite as thin as possible, of the chilled essence of pineapple. A remarkable, a delightful, concoction. Later I heard the refrescos referred to contemptuously by Americans whose attitude toward the Cubans paralleled their opinion of the local drinks. They elected whiskey, at times condescending to gin, and the effect was portentous. Some sat near me now, with breakfasts of bubbling ham and crisped eggs, lamenting the coffee.
It was doubtless part of the hypnotism of my liking for Havana that reconciled me to the coffee, poured simultaneously with hot salted milk into the cup. I accepted it at once, together with a cut French roll ingeniously buttered. Other efforts were made, through a window, to sell a wallpaper of lottery tickets; the vendor of magazines now put forward the Havana Post, printed in English; the curtains hung motionless, a transparent film on the bright space beyond.
There was nothing I had to do, or see, no duty to myself to fulfill; and, watching the stir of tourist departure, I was thankful for my total lack of uncomfortable incentive. I had, for instance, no intention of ascending the height of Morro Castle, which—I had hardly needed the assurance—included a fatiguing number of stairs; nor of becoming familiar with Cabañas fortress. It had been quite enough to see in passing that long pink wall and know that there were old batteries of cannon embossed with the sovereign names of Spain. There were no picture galleries; and in Havana the churches were rich in neither tradition nor beauty, and the convents of early days had been turned into warehouses. It was, on the whole, a city without obtrusive history; even its first site was on the other side of the island; the wall, except for a fragment or two, had gone; its early aspects were practically absorbed by the later spirit that had captivated me. Here, if ever, was a place in which honesty of mood could be completely indulged.
A state not innocent of danger to the Puritan tradition—lately assaulted with useless vigor—of suppression; for to the Latin acceptance of the whole of life had been added the passions of the tropics. Cuba had cynically realized this, and multiplied a natural frankness with a specialized attention to the northern masculinity I had seen leaving the hotel at odd hours last night. I felt even so soon, with prohibition a reality, that our national prudery was a very unfortunate influence indeed in Havana. The season was at an end—only a few days of the racing remained—so I had missed the obvious worst; but traces of the corruption of the dull, the dull themselves in diminishing numbers, lingered.
Havana, in common with other foreign countries, and with so many golden reasons to the contrary, had no general liking for Americans. The few who had understood Cuba, either living there or journeying with discretion, were most warmly appreciated; and, characteristically, it was they more than the natives who were principally disconcerted by the released waggishness of Maine and Ohio and Illinois. But the majority were merely exploited. There was, certainly, something on the other side of the fence, for the Cubans were morbidly sensitive about their land, their monuments and martyrs, not necessarily impressive to the Anglo-Saxon heritage and temperament. There were fundamental racial differences, with a preponderant ultimate weight in favor of continents as opposed to islands. The fascination Havana had for me wasn't inevitable; I was only considering with regret, æsthetic rather than moral, the effect on Cuba of any prostitution.
* * *
As, in a temporary stoppage of its circular traffic, I walked across the Parque Central, its limits seemed to extend indefinitely, as if it had become a Sahara of pavement exposed to the white core of the sun; and I passed with a feeling of immense relief into the shade of a book-shop at the head of Obispo Street, where the intolerable glare slowly faded from my vision as I fingered the heaps of volumes paper-bound in a variegated brightness of color and design. In any book-shop I was entirely at home, contented; and here specially I was prepossessed with the idea of buying a great number of the novels solely for their covers—in short, making a collection of Spanish pictorial bindings. But the novels, I discovered, were, even in paper, almost a peso each; and since I was reluctant to invest two hundred or more dollars in a mere beginning, the idea vanished. Their imaginative quality, however, the drawing and color printing, were excellent, far better than ours; in fact, we owned nothing at all like them.
They had a freedom of cruelty, a brutality of statement, of truth, absent in American sentimentality: where women were without clothes they were naked, anatomically accounted for, as were the men; and the symbolical representations of labor and injustice were instinct with blood and anguish. A surprising number of stories by Blasco Ibáñez were evident; and it struck me that if I had read him in those casual bright copies, without the ponderous weight of his American volumes and uncritical reputation, I might have found a degree of enjoyment. There were a great many magazines, mostly Spanish, gayly covered but with the stupidest contents imaginable—the bad reproductions of contemporary photographs on vile grey paper; although one, La Esefa, admirably reproduced, in vivid color and titles, the Iberian spirit of the lighter Goya.
Though I had been on narrow streets before, I had never seen one with the dramatic quality of Obispo. Hands might almost have touched across its paved way, and the sidewalks, no more than amplified curbs, hardly allowed for the width of a skirt. It was cooled by shadow, except for a narrow brilliant strip, and the open shops were like caverns. The windows were particularly notable, for they held the wealth, the choice, of what was offered within: diamonds and Panama hats, tortoise shell, Canary Island embroidery, and perfumery. There were cafés that specialized in minute cakes of chocolate and citron and almond paste set out in rows of surprisingly delicate workmanship, and shallow cafés whose shelves were banked with cordials and rons, gin, whiskies, and wine. There were bottles of eccentric shape holding divinely colored liqueurs, squat bottles and pinched, files of amber sauternes, miniature glass bears from Russia filled with Kümmel, yellow and green chartreuse, syrupy green and white menthes, the Cinziano vermouth of Italy, Spanish cider, and orderly companies of mineral waters.
These stores had little zinc-topped bars, and there were always groups of men sipping and conversing in their rapid intent manner. The street was crowded and, invariably allowing the women the wall, it was necessary to step again and again from the sidewalk. They were mostly Americans: the Cuban women abroad were in glittering automobiles, already elaborate in lace and jewels and dipping hats, and drenched in powder. They were, occasionally, when young, extremely beautiful, with a dark haughtiness that I had always found irresistible.
In my early impressionable years it had continually been my fate to be entranced by lovely disagreeable girls with cloudy black hair and skin stained with brown rather than pink. Imperious girls with elevated chins and straight sensitive noses! They had never, by any chance, paid the slightest attention to me; and the Cubans passing by with an air of supreme disdain called back my old interest and my old desire. I felt, for the moment, very young again and capable of romantic folly, of following a particular beauty to where her motor—a De Dion landaulet—disappeared into a courtyard with the closing of the great iron-bound doors.
A marked, not to say sensational, transformation of my own person had been a conspicuous part of that young imaginary business; for, though I was fat and clumsy, I managed to see myself tall and engaging, and dark, too; or, anyhow, a figure to beguile a charming girl. Something of that hopeless process had taken place in me once more, now the vainer for the fact that even my youth had gone. The quality which called back a past illusion was very positive in Havana, and my feeling for the city was greatly enriched, further defined. It was charged with hazard for what men like me had dreamed, leaving the actuality for the pretended; the pretended, that so easily became the false, was, in Havana, real.
The Obispo under its striped awnings, with its merchandise of coral and high combs and pineapple cloths; the women magnetic with a Spain that had slept with the East, the South; the bright blank walls, lemon yellow, blue, rose; the palms borne against the sky on trunks like dulled pewter; the palpable sense of withdrawn dark mystery, all created an atmosphere of a too potent seductiveness. The street ended in the Plaza de Armas, with the ultramarine sea beyond; and as I sat, facing the arched low buff façade of the President's Palace, my brain was filled with vivid fragments of emotion.
What suddenly I realized about Havana, the particular triumph of its miraculous vitality, was that it had never, like so much of Italy, degenerated into a museum of the past, it was not in any aspect mortuary. Its relics of the conquistadores were swept over by the flood of to-day. Yet I began to be vaguely conscious of the history of Cuba, of that Cuba from which Cortez had set sail, in the winter of fifteen hundred and nineteen, for Mexico. Later this would, perhaps, become clearer to me; not pedantically, but because the spirit of that early time was still alive. I made no effort to direct my mind into deep channels. What must come must come; and if it were a gin rickey rather than the slavery of the repartimento system, I'd be little enough disturbed.
The gin rickey proved to be an immediate reality, in the patio of the Inglaterra—a stream of silver bubbles shot into a glass where an emerald lime floated vivaciously. I had no intention of going out again until the shadows of the late afternoon had lengthened far toward the white front of the Gomez-Mena building across the plaza; and after lunch I went up to the quiet of my room. I should, certainly, write no letters, read—idly—none of the few books published about Cuba, which were on my table; and I began the essays of James Huneker called Bedouins. His rhapsodies over Mary Garden, as colorful in style as the glass above the window, I soon dropped and picked indifferently among the novels that remained. A poor lot—the thin current stream of American fiction, doubly pale in Havana.
The day wheeled from south to west. I was perfectly contented to linger doing nothing, scarcely thinking, in the subdued and darkened heat. There was a heavy passage of trunks through the echoing hall without, the melancholy calling of the evening papers rose on the air; I was enveloped in the isolation of a strange tongue. To sit as still as possible, as receptive as possible, to stroll aimlessly, watch indiscriminately, was the secret of conduct in my situation. Nothing could be planned or provided for. The thing was to get enjoyment from what I did and saw; what benefit I should receive, I knew from long experience, would be largely subconscious. I had been in Havana scarcely more than a day, and already I had collected a hundred impressions and measureless pleasure. How wise I had been to come ... extravagantly, with—as it were—a flower in my coat, a gesture of protest, of indifference, to all that the world now emphasized.
* * *
However, the tranquillity of the afternoon was sharply interrupted by my going, unexpectedly, to the races at Oriental Park. I had to dress with the utmost rapidity, leaving the choice of a tie to chance, for the dun car of the United States Military Attaché was waiting for me. The Attaché, handsomely bearing the brown seal of Philippine campaigns, abstracted in manner, sat forward with an imperturbable military chauffeur, while the back of the car was flooded by the affable speech of a Castilian marquis whose variety of experience in the realms of expert and dangerous games had been limited only by their known forms. It was unquestionably the mixture of my commonplace Presbyterian blood and incurable habit of romance that gave me a distinct satisfaction in my surroundings. I was glad that the Marquis was what he was and that he held a trans-continental motor record; it pleased my honest democratic instincts when other cars were held back for our progress; and, finally, the deep chairs on the veranda of the Jockey Club were precisely right for a lounging afternoon in an expensive sporting atmosphere.
The race track seemed to me long—was it a mile?—and, with the horses at a starting post across from the grandstand, I couldn't tell one from another. The grandstand was on the right, and beyond the park were low monotonous lines of stables. It had been raining, the track was heavy, and the race that followed the blowing of a bugle covered the silk of the jockeys with mud. My pleasure, as always, slowly subsided at the persistent intrusion of an inner destructive questioning. Incontestably the racing, the horses lining fretfully and scrambling through the muddy pools, left me cold. The sweep of the Jockey Club, too, was comparatively empty of interest; the spectators there, though they were more or less intent upon the results posted on the board opposite, were not the immemorial onlookers at such affairs of sweepstakes, selling plates and furloughs.
The Cuban women present, elaborately dressed for shaded lawns and salons de thé, were largely foreign to the wide-spread open spectacle. I remembered English races where groups of dukes with ruddy features, in rough tweeds, sat through drizzling afternoons on their iron-shod seat ricks, and women of title, in waterproofs and harsh brogues, tramped through the sloshing turf ... an attitude far removed from Havana. A group of royal palms, lifted in the middle distance, alone gave the races an exotic air; though they were, of course, promoted and ridden by Americans, and their mechanics were quite those which operated in New Orleans and Butte and Baltimore. Now I was annoyed because I had, thoughtlessly, come; I might as well have gone to the baseball game in what had formerly been the bull ring.
Yet I could retire to my speculations for escape, and I thought how peculiarly modern outdoor games, sport, belong to the British—to them and their relatives beyond the sea. I remembered, in this connection, the story of a French vicomte I knew, a man of imposing build, who, in yellow gloves, shot field larks attracted by the flashing of a mirror manipulated by his valet. Le sport! But the Spaniards, bred to the delicate agility of bull fighting, trained in endurance on the inconceivably fast pelota courts, were more athletic than the French; though, as a race, they were inclined to delegate their games to professionals. The sporting amateur, in spite of the Marquis, was a rarity; rather they chose to be lookers-on at brilliant diversions which retained an appreciable amount of a mediæval cruelty diversified from our own brutal strain.
This, naturally, had been influenced, strengthened, in Cuba by the climate, the breath of the tropics; even the winters were not conducive to violent exercise, aside from the fact that that was the prerogative of stolid temperaments. It was the deliberate, the unexcitable, who most excelled at trials of personal muscular skill; and neither of them were at home below certain latitudes. For myself, I was grateful, for I hadn't much in common with the exemplifications of field skill I had met. They were very apt to pay for their success by the absence of the attributes I particularly admired; often they were snobs of a very exasperating type—monuments of college beef with irreproachable hair, sacrosanct pins, and insensate conventional mentalities.
A race at an end, the jockeys, carrying their saddles, trooped to the judges' stand to be weighed, and I was shocked by their wizened, preternaturally cunning faces. They were like pygmies of a strange breed in red and yellow and blue satins; faultless for their purpose, on the ground they were extraordinary, leather-skinned, with puckering eyes, drawn mouths, and distorted bodies. They wrangled among themselves in shrill or foggy voices—a very depressing specialization of humanity. But the horses were magnificent, slender and shining. I admired them from a distance, glad that it was no part of my responsibility to ride. Long ago, under the pressure of an untender emotion, I had learned to sit on a horse through his reasonable moments; but I had never become at ease, and I stopped riding when, on the country road of a May Sunday noon, a tall sorrel ran away with me so fast and so far that we passed three churches with their scattering congregations.
There were, on the veranda, drinks, and even they—the Scotch highballs—translated into Spanish, had an unfamiliar and borrowed sound. It was on my return, stopping at the Telegrafo Café, that I learned the delightful possibility of a Daiquiri cocktail. It was twice as large as ordinary, what in the north was called a double; but no Daiquiri out of Cuba could be thought of in comparison. Only one other drink might be considered—a Ramos gin-fizz. My extreme allegiance had been given to the latter. I was not willing, even in the Telegrafo, to depose it from first place; but the Telegrafo was a pleasanter spot than the New Orleans Stag bar. I could see the beginning of the Prado, with the swirl of cars on their afternoon round to the Malecón. Some arc-lights, just turned on, were sources of color, like great symmetrical lemons, rather than of illumination. After another rain the bare flambeau trees would burst into fiery bloom.
I was alone, and, sauntering back to the Inglaterra, through the gallery that had once been the Paseo Isabel, I came on my flower man, who advanced with a smile and a close nosegay of gardenias. A curious flower, I thought, getting water for them in a glass. They didn't wilt, as was usual, but turned brown and faded in the manner of a lovely pallid woman—a simile I had used in Linda Condon. A flower that belonged less to nature than to drawing-rooms, to rococo salons and the opera loges of eighteen forty, and not at all to the present in the United States. But worn low on the neck, it was entirely appropriate to the black hair of the Cuban woman. Gold hair, the fair temperament, had no business with gardenias: bouquets of white sweet peas looped with pale green and silver ribbon, yes; and dark bunches of moss roses; the old bouquets of concentric rings of buds in lace paper! They were the property of the girls I had known, the frank girls with clear grey eyes and the appealing girls with eyes like forget-me-nots. Something more poignant, a heavier disturbing perfume, was necessary against a figure seen only from a balcony or with a vague fleetness behind a grille gracefully wrought out of iron.
My shutters now were opened, and I could make out, against the dimming sky, the languid folds of the Spanish flag above the entrance of the Centro Gallego—the standard that had conquered the western tropics, only, in turn, to be subdued by a freedom of the wind mightier than His Most Catholic Majesty.
* * *
There was some question of where I'd go for dinner, for in Havana there were many cafés to explore—the Dos Hermanos, the Paris, the Florida, the Hotel de Luz, the Miramar; but, finally, I walked down to the Prado, to the sea and the Miramar, a little because of its situation, directly on the Malecón, but principally for the reason that it had one of the most beautiful names possible, a name which called up the image of a level tide so smooth that it held in shining replica the forts, the ships, and the clouds. Tables were prepared for dinner in the restaurant, while those on the terrace were without cloths; but there I determined to sit, and the waiter whose attention I captured, after a long delay, agreed.
A solitary couple had their heads together by the window, and they, with myself, were the only diners. It was, evidently, not now the place to go to at this hour. Beyond the dining-room, a patio, or rather an open court, was set for dancing, melancholy as such spaces can be, deserted and half-lighted; but I saw that a considerable activity was expected much later.
I was glad that the terrace was empty, for, with the light now faded from the sea and its blueness merging into black, the remote tranquillity of evening was happier without a sharp chatter of voices. The Miramar, considering its place—the most advantageous in all Havana—and fame was surprisingly small: scarcely more than two stories high, the sombre maroon walls with their long windows hardly filled an angle of the Malecón. The dinner was slow in arriving, the silver made its appearance, a goblet was brought separately, a plate of French bread was later followed by its butter. The minute native oysters were no more than shreds adhering to their shells, but they had a notable flavor; a crawfish was at its brightest apogee; and an omelet browned in a delicate perfection of powdered sugar.
I deserted Spanish wine, the admirable Riscal, for champagne; for there was about an air of departed charm, the whisper of old waltzes and tarleton, that demanded commemoration. The Miramar had been the gay center of that mid-century life which had folded Havana in the lasting influence of its memories. A gaiety not even at a disadvantage compared to the feverish society of to-day! The bodices then had been no more than scraps of chambery gauze and Chinese ribbon below shoulders to the whiteness of which the entire feminine age had been devoted. The flounced bell skirts had swung airily on gracious silk clappers.
The automobiles on the Malecón multiplied, for the night was hot; soon there was a solid double opposed procession on the broad sweeping drive. This was a triumph of American engineering and, I had no doubt, an improvement on the informality of rocks and débris that had existed before. Yet I should liked to have seen it when the promenade had not yet been laid down with mechanical precision, in, perhaps, the early seventies. Then there were sea baths cut in the live rock at the end of the Paseo Isabel, at the Campos Eliseos, where the water was like a cooler liquid green air, and where, after storms, a foaming surf poured over the barriers. There were no motors then, but volantes and the modern quintrins, with two horses, one outside the shafts, and a riding calesero in vermilion and gold lace; and, latest of all, as new as possible, the victorias.
Neither, then, was the Prado paved, but the trees were infinitely finer—five rows there were in fifty-seven—when the clamor of the city was, in great part, peals of bells. This was a familiar process with me, to leave the present for the past in a mood of irrational regret. But never for the heroic, the real past; the years I chose to imagine lay hardly behind the horizon; in Italy it had been the Risorgimento, at farthest the villeggiatura of Antonio Longo or the viole d'amore of Cimarosa in churches. And now, drinking my champagne on the empty flagged terrace of the Miramar, facing, across the parade of automobiles, the blank curtain of the night, starred on the right by the lights of castellated forts, my mind vibrated with grace notes no longer heard outside the faint distilled sweetness of music boxes.
As if in derision of this, a loud unexpected music rose from the bandstand in the Plaza, and I saw that a flood of people, seated or moving along the pavements and through the lanes of chairs, had gathered. Nothing, I thought, could have delighted me more; but my anticipation was soon smothered by the absurdity of the selections: they were not from Balfé nor Rossini, neither military nor the accented rhythm of Spain ... the opening number was Parsifal, blown into the profound night with a convention of brassy emphasis.
At the total destruction of my pleasure I cursed the pretentious stupidity of the band-master and a great deal else of modern Cuba. I remembered particularly some regrets, locally expressed, that the Spanish domination was no more. Things, it was said, were better ordered then. But this was a position the vainness of which I couldn't join: it was no part of my disposition to combat, or even regret, the inevitable. My course—quite other—was to project myself into periods whose very loss formed most of their charm. Gone, they took on the tender memories of the dead, and were invested with the dignity, the beauty, of a warm fragility.
Two girls were now seated at a table by the entrance, and, though they were alone for the moment, it was evident that they had no intention of remaining in that unprofitable state longer than necessary. Their fleet appraising glances rested on me and the silver bucket by my chair, and one permitted the shadow of a discreet smile to appear on her carmined lips. She was pretty, lightly dressed in a flowery summer stuff, but she was as gold in coloring as corn silk; an intrusion in Havana I seriously deplored. The other was dark, but she was, at the same time, disagreeable; something had annoyed her excessively, and I made no move. Such company was occasionally entertaining, in a superficial conversational sense; but, I was obliged to add, not often.
I went over all the informal girls I could recall who had been worth the effort to cultivate them, either charming or wise or sensitive, and my bag, unlike Chopin's or what George Moore reported his, was discouragingly slim. They had been, but perhaps of necessity, materialists, valuers only of the expensively concrete; yes, the majority of such adventures had been sordid. It was due, without question, to certain deterrent qualities in my own personality; but even more, I was convinced, to the fact that, in America, girls, or at least those of my youth, regarded emotion as portentously synonymous with ruin. Emotion, for nice girls, was deprecated; their sense of modesty, of shame, was magnified at the expense of everything else. This, together with the tragic difference in the age of marriage in nature and in society, had condemned the United States to very low levels of feeling.
Unfortunately I had been born into the most rigid of all societies—a prosperous and Presbyterian middle-class; an influence that succeeded in making religion hideous before I was fifteen, planting in me, too, the belief that man was, in his instinctive life, filthy. I outgrew the latter, but never the first; and now, looking back, I could recognize how that lauded creed had nearly damned me to a hell far surpassing in dreadfulness anything of its own bitter imagining. The cold metaphysical fog had saturated us all alike.... How dreary my early experience was ... what detestable travesties of passion! A carful of young men soon stopped at the curb of the Miramar, and the two girls, dark and gold, were immediately invested with the politest attentions. There was a chorus of laughter and protests and suggestions, in which a privileged waiter joined; and afterwards they vociferously left to dance at Carmelo.
* * *
Walking generally in the direction of my room, I left the Prado for an especially dramatic, no, melodramatic, street, where the bare walls and iron bolted doors were made startling by the white glare of electric lights. Fixed to the walls, infrequently, were the wrought-iron brackets of the earlier lanterns, converted, it might be, for the period before the present, into gas jets. In that watery illumination such streets must have seemed less amazing than now, and entirely natural with only the oil lanterns lifting a small surface of masonry or an isolated angle out of the night. Indeed, whole districts were dark, except for a rare lamp privately maintained as an obligation of grace. That darkness, like the streets, was mediæval; they belonged one to the other—ways through which it was congruous to carry a flare and a sword, practical measures both.
These precautions had been long discarded, but the passages themselves were unchanged, not a stone had shifted; they were, particularly at night, the Middle Ages. And it was as though a sudden blaze had been created by unholy magic; a sparkling and infernal radiance, throwing into intolerable clearness the decent reticence of the time. The arc lights gave the streets an absolute air of unreality and tragic strangeness. Moving in them, I had the feeling of blundering awake into a dream, of being irretrievably lost in an illusion of potential horror. An open door with its glimpse into an inner room only increased the oppression: it, too, was brilliant with electricity, a room of unrelieved icy pallor, except for a warmer blur under an Agony on the Cross, where a small company of men and women sat in a rigid blanched formality that might have been death.
It was quite natural, a commonplace of Havana; but rather than a picture of familiar life, it resembled the memento mori of a grotto. My thoughts turned to the symbols and representations of the Catholic Church—a business of blood and torment and flame, of Sebastian torn with arrows and a canonized girl, whose name I forgot, carrying her eyeballs in a hand. Curiously enough, the spirit which had given birth to this suffering had been popularly lost, together with any conception of the ages in which it occurred; and all that remained was a pathological horror. Italy and Spain were saturated by it—Italy in the revolting wax spectacles of Easter, and Spain with the veritable crucifixions of to-day.
It was, I supposed, to a certain extent unavoidable in an establishment whose hold on the ponderable present depended on threats and promises laid in the future. But it seemed to me unfortunate, to say the least, that a church whose business was life should be so concerned with smoky death. Threats and promises! The early history of Cuba, I remembered, was inbound with the administrative and protective powers of the Church: in fifteen hundred and sixteen the native Cubeños were put in the charge of the Order of Jeronimites, localized in La Espanola—Santo Domingo. The double motive of the Spanish Christian kings in the western hemisphere had been conversion and gold, but which of these was uppermost it was impossible to determine. However, when the gold, the temporal interest, decreased in one locality, the spiritual concern of Seville shifted to the more productive regions.
That was a period, a conquest, when a violent death was a greater blessing than living in a state of damnable heresy; and so, between the saving of their souls and the loss of their bodies in the king's mines, the natives were thoroughly cared for. It must be said, though, that de las Casas, a priest whose spirit was above any intimidation or venality, denounced the outrages against the Cuban Indians to the shining heavens, the cerulean sea, the Audencia, and the Throne. But his humanitarianism was ineffectual against a system founded on the belief that a god had given the earth and its recalcitrant people for the profit and glory, the servants, of a single religious dogma.
It was, possibly, a mental imperfection which gave impressions, emotions, such a great suggestibility. Returning toward the Inglaterra, I had no intention of losing myself in the mazes of applied theology; and I speedily dropped such a sombre topic from my thoughts. Turning back to the Prado, I found the walks filled with men, progressing slowly or seated on the flat marble benches along the sides. Whenever a woman did pass on foot, their interest and speculations were endless: heads turned in rows, sage remarks were exchanged, and tentative simpaticas murmured. Her mother—if she had the slightest pretensions to youth or good looks—was fervently blessed for so fetching a daughter. Here, of course, was the defect of the local attitude toward women—it put the emphasis perpetually on a gallantry affecting the men more even than the women. There was a constant danger of becoming one-sided.
The Telegrafo and the Louvre were crowded, with more refrescos and ices on the table than authoritative drinks; the cigarettes of the discursive throngs in the Parque Central were like a sheet of fire-flies, and the Marti and Pairet theatres were spreading abroad the audiences of their second evening shows. The patio of the Inglaterra was well filled, and I stopped there; not, however, for a naranjada. Some late suppers were still occupying the dining-room, and a drunken American was gravely addressing a table and meeting with a mechanical politeness that I admired for its sustained patience. He left, finally, and wandered unsteadily, a subject of entertainment for his fellows and a mark of contempt to the Cubans present. Beyond me were some beautifully dressed English—two men in the final perfection of easy masculine garb and a girl, flushed with beauty, in pearls. On the other hand a young Frenchman, decorated with the most honorable of war ribbons, and two women, all in mourning, were conversing in the difficult Parisian idiom.
I should have liked to be at either table—their attractions were equal; but, forced to remain alone, I thought of how rude the English would have been had I moved over to them. The English would have been boorish, and the French would have met me with an impenetrable polite reserve. Both would regard me as an idiot or an agent; to have spoken to them would have been an affront. And yet I was confident that we should have got on very well: I was not without a name in London, and the French were delightfully sensitive to any practising of the arts. The English, I gathered from their unguarded talk, were cruising on a yacht now lying in Havana harbor; and I saw myself, the following morning, going off to them in a smart tender and sitting under the white awning spread aft, with a whisky and soda, talking or not, but happily aware of the shining brass and mahogany fittings, the immaculate paint and gay pennants.
I had always liked worldly pomp and settings, marble Georgian houses with the long windows open directly on closed greens and statues of lead; and to linger, before going down to dinner, on a minstrel's gallery above a stone hall and gathered company. I'd rather be on a yacht than on an excursion boat; yet I infinitely preferred reading about the latter. For some hidden or half perceived reason, yachts were not impressive in creative prose; there the concerns and pleasures of aristocracy frequently appeared tawdry and unimportant. Even its heroism, in the valor of battle and imperturbable sacrifice, was less moving to me than simpler affairs. Yet there was no doubt but that I was personally inclined to the extremes of luxury; and this apparent contradiction brought to my life, my writing, the problem of a devotion to words as disarmingly simple as the leaves of spring—as simple and as lovely in clear color—about the common experience of life and death, together with an absorbing attention for Manchu women and exotic children and emeralds.
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