1917.291 H54
Spn n-M otnTnl do l
Keep Your Card in this Pocket
Books will be issued only on presentation of
f roper library cards.
Unless labeled otherwise, books may be re-
tained for four weeks. Borrowers finding books **
narked, defaced or mutilated are expected to
report same at library desk; otherwise the last
borrower will be held responsible for all im-
perfections discovered.
The card holder is responsible for all books
drawn on his card.
No books issued unless penalties are paid.
Lost cards and change of residence must be
reported promptly. *
PUBLIC LIBRARY
Kansas City, Mo,
Keep Your Card In this Pocket
PEEK fcNVELOPE CO., K. C. MO.
Q ODDl D1S3S7M 5
D.:A HABANA
JOSE.P.H, J3ERGESHEIMER
% ' ' '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 CRISTOBAL DE LA HABANA
Published in New York by
ALFRED A. KNOPF
and for sale at all bookshops
SAN CRISTOBAL
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
ALFRED A. KNOPF,
PBIKTBD IK THE "UNITED STATES OT AMERICA
To
H. J. B. BAIRD
An
Havana
which he is free
to decline in every particular
save the
dedication
SAN CRISTOBAL
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 geographi-
cal 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, ap-
proaching Havana in the early morning, noth-
ing so tyrannical and absolute; yet, watching
the silver greenness of Cuba rising from the
[9]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 re-
solving 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 accus-
tomed 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 lus-
trous 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 iso-
[10]
San Cristobal de la Habana
lated, 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 in-
digo ... 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 Ha-
vana I considered the possibilities of such a
story, such a character:
She had her existence in the seventeenth
San Cristobal de la Habana
century, when Morgan marched inland to
rape Camagiiey 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 heri-
tage of Spain's civilization, a murderous, sul-
len, passionate jade, wholly treacherous and in-
stinct with ferine curiosity. The master for
her, I decided, must come from the Court of
Charles, the London of the Cavalier Parlia-
ment, 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 man-
groves; 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.
[12]
San Cristobal de la Habana
The Cuban shore was now so close, Havana
so imminent, that I lost my story in a new in-
terest 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 to-
ward 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 Embarka-
tion for Cytherea.
' Nothing could have made me happier than
this realization; an extension of the impres-
sion of a haunting dream turned into solid
fact. The buildings multiplied to the sight,
bathed in a glamorous radiance; and, sud-
denly, on the other hand, rose Morro Castle.
That structure, small and compact and re-
markably like its numerous pictures, gave me
a distinct feeling of disappointment Its im-
San Cristobal de la Habana
portance 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
Cabanas 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
[14]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 fagades 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,
San Cristobal de la Habana
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! Or-
nament 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
Helene.
# # #
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 wait-
ing outside. The deep entrance with its re-
flected planes of subdued light and servants in
cool linen; the patio with water, its white
arches on iridescent tiles ; the dining-room laid
[16],
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 sur-
passed what, until then, I had seen. There
were slatted door screens, cream-colored with
a sapphire-blue glass knob, topped in an elabo-
rate 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 conclu-
sion 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
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 in-
tensely 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 sin-
gularly 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 con-
[18]
San Cristobal de la Habana
servatories, and at once a memory of my child-
hood 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 familiar-
ity, of which I have already spoken. The city
was wholly expressed by the fanlight spark-
ling with the shifting radiance of the blazing
day. It was possible, without leaving the
room, to grasp the essential spirit of a place
50 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 im-
pulse, a limiting materialism, pointed out
that, since I had come away for a change of
scene, I had best realize a semblance of my
San Cristobal de la Habana
intention. Still those colors, like a bouquet
of translucent tulips, easily outweighed in im-
portance all that I subsequently gained ; they
gave the emotional pitch, the intellectual note,
of whatever followed a mood, an entire ex-
istence, into which I walked with the turning
of a sapphire-blue knob.
For the rest the furniture was scant a wal-
nut 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 blend-
ing of harsh traffic alarms and blurred cries
announcing newspapers.
It was later when I went out on my bal-
cony: 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
[20]
San Cristobal de la Habana
paseo below was hung with gaily covered
magazines ; a bootblack, wrinkled and active,
with a single chair on a high stand, was clean-
ing a row of white shoes, obviously from the
hotel ; and the newsboys were calling La Pol-
itica Comica in a long-drawn minor inflec-
tion.
The sun, that I had seen rising on the un-
discovered hills of Cuba, was sinking behind
the apprehended city; it touched the carya-
tids of the Gallego Club and enveloped, in a
diminished gold like a fine suffusion of pre-
cious 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 shad-
ows were violet. The shadows slowly thick-
ened and merged; they seemed to swell up-
ward from the streets, the Parque; and the
buildings, in turn, became lavender, and then,
again, a glimmering white. Only the lifted
[21]
San Cristobal de la Habana
green of the palms was changeless, positive,
until it was lost in darkness.
A great many people appeared below, mov-
ing 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 mo-
notony, of stupidity women were an abso-
lute essential to the variety of any spectacle;
and here, except for an occasional family
group hurrying to a cafe, 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 im-
penetrable, blank, to the streets, but open on
the garden rooms of patios. And suddenly
while the moment before I had been impa-
[22]
San Cristobal de la Habana
tient at the bareness resulting from their ab-
sence 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 re-
garded 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 agree-
ment that any one might look, the intensest
gaze was invited, with the understanding that
almost none should desire ; and a cloak of hy-
pocrisy had been the result; either that or the
beauty was mechanical, the gesture furtive
and hard.
[23]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 loveli-
ness, 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 com-
pletely circumspect except in situations mor-
ally and financially solid.
My dressing for dinner I delayed luxuri-
ously, 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, vari-
ously filled, in place of merely a bag, as I
might have done; for it was evident that Ha-
vana required many changes of clothes. It
[24]
San Cristobal de la Habana
was a city which to enjoy demanded a metic-
ulous attention to trifles. For one thing it
was going to be hot, April was well advanced ;
and the glorietas, the brightly illuminated
open cafes, the thronged Prado and operatic
Maleco'n, the general air of tropical expen-
siveness, insisted on the ornamental fitness of
its idlers.
I debated comfortably the security of a din-
ner 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 apolo-
gize for lingering over these details, but it
might be necessary to warn the seekers after
noble truisms that I had no part in their right-
eous 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 in-
stinct had become, in an experience of life not
San Cristobal de la Habana
without supporting evidence, the firmest pos-
sible attitude. A tone of candor, if my reflec-
tions were to have the slightest interest or
value, was my first necessity; and candor com-
pelled 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 en'ormous interest, which, just
then, held the most significant and valuable
crop growing on earth. But that didn't de-
tain my imagination for a moment. The Ha-
vana 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 ac-
tual 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 di-
[26]
San Cristobal de la Habana
lemma 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 correspond-
ence between the two, a personal exterior as
nicely selected as possible and the mental at-
titude 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 har-
mony 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
[27]
San Cristobal de la Habana
powdered throats hung with the clotted iri-
descence 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 my-
self, all very reprehensible and delightful :
Here were creatures, anatomically planned
for the sole end of maternity, who had wil-
fully, wisely I felt, elevated the mere pre-
liminary 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 im-
memorial duty, they proclaimed by every en-
hanced and seductive curve that their inten-
tion 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
[28]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 pur-
pose masked in an unfamiliar language, they
shared with the alabaster of the facades, the
high fronds of the royal palms and the monu-
ment to Marti, in the tropical, the classic, ro-
manticism.
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
San Cristobal de la Habana
odor; those I had expected, but what surprised
me were some sprigs of orange blossom with
an indefinite sweetness that was yet percepti-
ble above the thicker scents. I chose the
latter immediately, and the flower vendor,
wholly comprehensive of my mood, placed the
boutonniere 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, n*ot 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 content-
ment to an even higher pitch ; and, with a de-
tached amusement, I recalled the fact that far-
ther 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
[30]
San Cristobal de la Habana
sugar, the power of a contemptuous indiffer-
ence to fate ; it set the mind free of responsi-
bility; obliterating both memory and to-mor-
row, 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 pre-
pared, intoxicating drinks. . . . The word in-
toxicating adequately expressed their power,
their menace to orderly monotonous resigna-
tion. 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 priv-
ilege, abhorrent to authority. And, since the
dull were so fatally in the majority, they lhad
succeeded in attaching a heavy penalty to
whatever lay outside their lymphatic under-
standing. They had, as well, made the term
gay an accusation before their Lord, con-
founding 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 repre-
San Cristobal de la Habana
hensibly .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 din-
ing-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 ef-
fect of the dining-room as a whole, as an ex-
panse of the utmost decorative correctness, and
there were a number of men with quite
[32]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 al-
most against my chair, a brilliant section of
the^plaza was directly at my shoulder, and I
was pervaded by the essential feeling of hav-
ing 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, tem-
porarily, less of Havana, of myself, and of the
world. The passionate interest in living, the
sense of aesthetic security, that resulted in my
turning continually to the inconceivable slav-
ery of writing, would have been absent. But
seated in one of the most desirable spots in ex-
istence, 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 tri-
umph of intelligent sympathy, conferred with
[33]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 kaleid-
oscope of the Parque was revolving in patterns
of bright yellows, silver, and indigo. Pas-
sersby 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 with-
out unfolded a bright glazed sheaf of unspeak-
ably stupid American magazines; farther off,
the crowd eddied through the lanes between
the innumerable chairs drawn up companion-
ably on the plaza. At a table close by, a fam-
ily 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 mous-
tache of which not one hair seemed uncounted
[34]
San Cristobal de la Habana
or mislaid, regarded his short fat wife, his tall
slim son, and his two entrancing daughters
with an impartially active and affectionate at-
tention. 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 emphasis 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 re-
pose 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 re-
serve and flexibility, was absent from the
cruder young of the north.
He had, at the same time, an indefinable air
[35]
San Cristobal de la Habana
of melancholy, a bearing that, while not de-
void 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 Cabanas foss, he would have borne
with brilliant success; he'd have ornamented
charmingly the security of a great coffee es-
tate 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 secur-
ity, 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 peo-
ple. He represented, from the crown of his
[36]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 fol-
low that. And women in starched linen col-
lars, with starched theories of civic conscious-
ness, would hardly be an improvement on
fragrant memories of satin, moments of pas-
sion and frailty, and the beauty of tenderness.
A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, rep-
resented 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
[37]
San Cristobal de la Habana
the next table. He took a cigarette from a
black silk case, and I was immediately re-
minded of my cigar.
It had been chosen with immense care in the
Inglaterra cafe 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 hes-
itated for a minute or more between a Lar-
ranaga and a banquet Corona, and finally de-
cided 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 Mar-
nier, the distilled last saturation of oranges
and fin champagne; and the Larranaga, the
color of oak leaves freshly brown, combined in
a transcending magic of contentment.
[38]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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, par-
ticularly, 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 Cu-
bans, were, in the interest of vague appoint-
ments, 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 ci-
gar continued to veil me in its reflective smoke
for another half hour, there was more coffee
[39]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 blos-
soms 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
[40]
San Cristobal de la Habana
weather offered an illimitable range of sug-
gestion.
It had been the great discovery of imagina-
tive prose the novel for which we care most
had been largely the result of that gained ap-
preciation; 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 rec-
ords 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 Tnglaterra 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
[41]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 an-
other 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 di-
agonal structures of shade. Modified, infre-
quently, by the gorgeous cumulous clouds
drifting from the upward thrust, the anchor-
age, of the Andes, the entire process of the
hours was upset This was not simply a varia-
tion of inanimate surface, it had an exact
counterpart in the emotions: bowed by an in-
[42]
San Cristobal de la Habana
superable blaze or upright in the veiled sun,
the attitude of harmony was profoundly af-
fected. The night was altogether separate,
a time, I gathered, when it seldom rained ; and
there was never another city that took advan-
tage of the night like Havana. Released from
the resplendent tyranny of the sun, everyone,
it appeared, disdaining sleep, lingered in the
plazas, the cafes, 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 Cu-
bans thronging abroad, on foot and in motors,
early and late. The whiteness of the build-
ings, too, even where they were not illumi-
nated, defined spaces never obscure; the city
was never wholly lost, obliterated by the im-
ponderable 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.
[43]
San Cristobal de la Habana
For myself, my entire attitude was differ-
ent in the room I now inhabited from the in-
herent feeling, in New York, of the Algon-
quin. 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
3nce, was one of the comfortable peculiarities
Df Havana : it was always possible to be cool
in a cafe with the marble floor sprinkled with
water; at the entrance of the Inglaterra,
where, however, the chairs were the most un-
comfortable in the world ; or, better yet, with
a. book, a naranjada, and pajamas, transiently
it 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 pina colado a glass,
nearly as large and quite as thin as possible, of
[44]
San Cristobal de la Habana
the chilled essence of pineapple. A remark-
able, 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
[45]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 Cabanas 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 frag-
ment 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 Puri-
tan tradition lately assaulted with useless
vigor of suppression; for to the Latin ac-
ceptance of the whole of life had been added
[46]
San Cristobal de la Habana
the passions of the tropics. Cuba had cyni-
cally 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 na-
tional prudery was a very unfortunate influ-
ence 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 them-
selves 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 Ameri-
cans. The few who had understood Cuba,
either living there or journeying with discre-
tion, 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
[47]
San Cristobal de la Habana
were morbidly sensitive about their land, their
monuments and martyrs, not necessarily im-
pressive to the Anglo-Saxon heritage and
temperament There were fundamental ra-
cial 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, aesthetic 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 arly book-shop I was
entirely at home, contented ; and here specially
[48]
San Cristobal de la Habana
I was prepossessed with the idea of buying a
great number of the novels solely for their
covers in short, making a collection of Span-
ish pictorial bindings. But the novels, I dis-
covered, 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 senti-
mentality : where women were without clothes
they were naked, anatomically accounted
for, as were the men; and the symbolical
representations of labor and injustice were in-
stinct with blood and anguish. A surprising
number of stories by Blasco Ibaiiez were evi-
dent; and it struck me that if I had read him
in those casu'al bright copies, without the pon-
derous weight of his American volumes and
uncritical reputation, I might have found a
degree of enjoyment There were a great
[49]
San Cristobal de la Habana
many magazines, mostly Spanish, gayly
covered but with the stupidest contents im-
aginable the bad reproductions of contem-
porary photographs on vile grey paper; al-
though 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 cafes that specialized in minute
cakes of chocolate and citron and almond paste
set out in rows of surprisingly delicate work-
manship, and shallow cafes whose shelves
were banked wi-th cordials and rons, gin,
[50]
San Cristobal de la Habana
whiskies, and wine. There were bottles of
eccentric shape holding divinely colored li-
queurs, squat battles and pinched, files of am-
ber sauternes, miniature glass bears from Rus-
sia filled with Kiimmel, 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, al-
ready elaborate in lace and jewels and dipping
hats, and drenched in powder. They were,
occasionally, when young, extremely beauti-
ful, 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
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 dis-
appeared into a courtyard with the closing
of the great iron-bound doors.
A marked, not to say sensational, transfor-
mation of my own person had been a conspicu-
ous 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.
San Cristobal de la Habana
It was charged with hazard for what men like
me 'had dreamed, leaving the actuality for the
pretended; the pretended, that so easily be-
came 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, fac-
ing the arched low buff facade of the Presi-
dent's Palace, my brain was filled with vivid
fragments of emotion.
What suddenly I realized about Havana,
the particular triumph of its miraculous vital-
ity, 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
[53]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 re-
partimento system, I'd be little enough dis-
turbed.
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 be-
[54]
San Cristobal de la Habana
gan the essays of James Huneker called Be-
douins. His rhapsodies over Mary Garden,
as colorful in style as the glass above the win-
dow, 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 dark-
ened 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 con-
duct 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 ex-
perience, would be largely subconscious. I
had been in Havana scarcely more than a day,
and already I had collected a hundred impres-
[551
San Cristobal de la Habana
sions 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, unex-
pectedly, 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 Attache was waiting
for me. The Attache, handsomely bearing
the brown seal of Philippine campaigns, ab-
stracted in manner, sat forward with an imper-
turbable 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 com-
monplace Presbyterian blood and incurable
habit of romance that gave me a distinct satis-
faction in my surroundings. I was glad that
[56]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 loung-
ing afternoon in an expensive sporting atmos-
phere.
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 mo-
notonous lines of stables. It had been raining,
the track was heavy, and the race that fol-
lowed the blowing of a bugle covered the silk
of the jockeys with mud. My pleasure, as
always, slowly subsided at the persistent intru-
sion of an inner destructive questioning. In-
contestably the racing, the horses lining fret-
fully and scrambling through the muddy
pools, left me cold. The sweep of the Jockey
Club, too, was comparatively empty of inter-
est; the spectators there, though they were
[57]
San Cristobal de la Habana
more or less intent upon the results posted on
the board opposite, were not the immemorial
onlookers at such affairs of sweepstakes, sell-
ing plates and furloughs.
The Cuban women present, elaborately
dressed for shaded lawns and salons de the,
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 after-
noons on their iron-shod seat ricks, and women
of title, in waterproofs and harsh brogue-s,
tramped through the sloshing turf ... an at-
titude 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
[58]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 manipu-
lated by his valet. Le sport! But the Span-
iards, bred to the delicate agility of bull fight-
ing, trained in endurance on the inconceiv-
ably fast pelota courts, were more athletic
than the French ; though, as a race, they were
inclined to delegate their games to profes-
sionals. 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 mediae-
val 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
C59]
San Cristobal de la Habana
temperaments. It was the deliberate, the un-
excitable, who most excelled at trials of per-
sonal 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 attri-
butes I particularly admired; often they were
snobs of a very exasperating type monuments
of college beef with irreproachable hair, sacro-
sanct pins, and insensate conventional mental-
ities.
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 yel-
low and blue satins; faultless for their pur-
pose, 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.
[60]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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 rid-
ing when, on the country road of a May Sun-
day 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 Cafe, 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
[61]
San Cristobal de la Habana
place ; but the Telegraf o was a pleasanter spot
than the New Orleans Stag bar. I could see
the beginninng of the Prado, with the swirl
of cars on their afternoon round to the Male-
con. 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 In-
glaterra, 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 na-
ture 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 appropri-
ate to the black hair of the Cuban woman.
[62]
San Cristobal de la Habana
Gold hair, the fair temperament, had no busi-
ness 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 grace-
fully wrought out of iron.
My shutters now were opened, and I could
make out, against the dimming sky, the lan-
guid folds of the Spanish flag above the en-
trance 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 Maj-
esty.
* * *
There was some question of where I'd go
for dinner, for in Havana there were many
[63]
San Cristobal de la Habana
cafes to explore the Dos Hermanos, the
Paris, the Florida, the Hotel de Luz, the Mi-
ramar; but, finally, I walked down to the
Prado, to the sea and the Miramar, a little be-
cause of its situation, directly on the Malecon,
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 pre-
pared for dinner in the restaurant, while those
on the terrace were without cloths ; but there
I determined to sit, and the waiter whose at-
tention 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,
[64]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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, con-
sidering 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 Malecon. The dinner
was slow in arriving, the silver made its ap-
pearance, 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 com-
memoration. The Miramar had been the gay
center of that mid-century life which had
folded Havana in the lasting influence of its
[65]
San Cristobal de la Habana
memories. A gaiety not even at a disadvan-
tage 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 de-
voted. The flounced bell skirts had swung
airily on gracious silk clappers.
The automobiles on the Malecon multi-
plied, for the night was^iot; 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 debris that had existed before. Yet I
should liked to have seen it when the prome-
nade had not yet been laid down with mechan-
ical 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 mod-
[66]
San Cristobal de la Habana
era 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 Cima-
rosa 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 sweet-
ness of music boxes.
As if in derision of this, a loud unexpected
[67]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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
Balfe 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, lo-
cally 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 re-
gret, 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,
[68]
San Cristobal de la Habdna
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 inten-
tion of remaining in that unprofitable state
longer than necessary. Their fleet apprais-
ing 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 occasion-
ally entertaining, in a superficial conversa-
tional 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 culti-
vate them, either charming or wise or sensitive,
and my bag, unlike Chopin's or what George
[69]
San Cristobal de la Habana
Moore reported his, was discouragingly slim.
They had been, but perhaps of necessity, ma-
terialists, valuers only of the expensively con-
crete ; yes, the majority of such adventures had
been sordid. It was due, without question,
to certain deterrent qualities in my own per-
sonality; but even more, I was convinced, to
the fact that, in America, girls, or at least
those of my youth, regarded emotion as por-
tentously synonymous with ruin. Emotion*,
for nice girls, was deprecated; their sense of
modesty, of shame, was magnified at the ex-
pense 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 Pres-
byterian middle-class; an influence that suc-
ceeded in making religion hideous before I
was fifteen, planting in me, too, the belief that
man was, in his instinctive life, filthy. I out-
grew the latter, but never the first; and now,
looking back, I could recognize how that
[70]
San Cristobal de la Habana
lauded creed had nearly damned me to a hell
far surpassing in dreadfulness anything of its
own bitter imagining. The cold metaphysi-
cal fog had saturated us all alike. . . . How
dreary my early experience was . . . what
detestable travesties of passion! A earful 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 privi-
leged 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 dra-
matic, no, melodramatic, street, where the bare
walls and iron bolted doors were made start-
ling 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 il-
[70
San Cristobal de la Habana
lumination 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 obli-
gation of grace. That darkness, like the
streets, was mediaeval; they belonged one to
the other ways through which it was con-
gruous 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 radi-
ance, 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 illu-
sion of potential horror. An open door with
[72]
San Cristobal de la Habana
its glimpse into an inner room only increased
the oppression : it, too, was brilliant with elec-
tricity, 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 eye-
balls in a hand. Curiously enough, the spirit
which had given birth to this suffering had
been popularly lost, together with any concep-
tion 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 un-
[73]
San Cristobal de la Habana
avoidable 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 re-
membered, was inbound with the administra-
tive and protective powers of the Church: in
fifteen hundred and sixteen the native Cube-
nos were put in the charge of the Order of Jer-
onimites, 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 in-
terest, decreased in one locality, the spiritual
concern of Seville shifted to the more produc-
tive regions.
That was a period, a conquest, when a vio-
lent death was a greater blessing than living
in a state of damnable heresy; and so, be-
tween the saving of their -souls and the loss of
[74]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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, de-
nounced the outrages against the Cuban In-
dians to the shining heavens, the cerulean sea,
the Audencia, and the Throne. But his hu-
manitarianism was ineffectual against a sys-
tem 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 re-
ligious dogma.
It was, possibly, a mental imperfection
which gave impressions, emotions, such a great
suggestibility. Returning toward the Ingla-
terra, 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 ex-
[75]
San Cristobal de la Habana
changed, and tentative simpaticas murmured.
Her mother if she had the slightest preten-
sions to youth or good looks was fervently
blessed for so fetching a daughter. Here, of
course, was the defect of the local attitude to-
ward women it put the emphasis perpetually
on a gallantry affecting the men more even
than the women. There was a constant dan-
ger of becoming one-sided.
The Telegrafo and the Louvre were
crowded, with more ref rescos and ices on the
table than authoritative drinks; the cigarettes
of the discursive throngs in the Parque Cen-
tral 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
[76]
San Cristobal de la Habana
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, dec-
orated with the most honorable of war rib-
bons, 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 re-
main alone, I thought of how rude the English
would have been had I moved over to them.
The English would have been boorisih, and
the French would have met me with an im-
penetrable polite reserve. Both would re-
gard 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 Lon-
don, and the French were delightfully sensi-
tive to any practising of the arts. The Eng-
lish, I gathered from their unguarded talk,
were cruising on a yacht now lying in Havana
[77]
San Cristobal de la Habana
harbor; and I saw myself, the following morn-
ing, 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 mahog-
any fittings, the immaculate paint and gay
pennants.
I had always liked worldly pomp and set-
tings, 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 con-
[78]
San Cristobal de la Habana
tradiction 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 ex-
perience of life and death, together with an
absorbing attention for Manchu women and
exotic children and emeralds.
The following day, hot and still, with the
exception of capricious movements of air in
paved shaded places, was overcast, the bril-
liancy of Havana, of the white and green pla-
zas, subdued. And this softening of sharp
lines and blazing fagades seemed to influence,
too, the noises, the calls, of the streets, so that
it was all apparently insubstantial, like the
ultimate romantic mirage of a city. I wan-
dered along Neptuno Street to Belascoin, and
then to the Parque Maceo, where I ignored the
massed bronze and granite of its statue for the
slightly undulating shimmering tide. In the
distance the sea was lost in the sky a nebu-
lous gray expanse such as might have ex-
[79]
San Cristobal de la Habana
isted before the beginning of comparative so-
lidity. I lost all sense of time, the centuries
were jumbled together like mango.s in a basket.
Yes, they were no greater, no more important
or stable, than tropical fruit.
The vivid spectacle of Cuba, for example,
contracted to a palm's breadth, the island be-
came nothing more than the glimmer of a
torch in illimitable dusk. It had been discov-
ered by Columbus, a presumptuous term used
arrogantly in the sense of created; an Arca-
dian shore where, because food grew without
cultivation, without effort, and the gold was
soft for beating into bracelets, the natives lived
easily and ornamentally and in peace. They
wore, rather than steel and the harsh shirts
of the Inquisition, the feathers of birds with
woven dyed quills and fragrant grasses.
They sang, they danced with a notable grace,
loved and died in the simplicity of bohios of
palm board and thatch under nine Caciques.
Then, in the drawing of a breath, they were
all destroyed, gone, killed by slavery, in the
name of God on the points of swords, by the
[80]
San Cristobal de la Habana
rapacity, the corruption, the diseases, of civili-
zation. A Spanish Cuba rose Iberian and
yet singularly different a business of Cap-
tain-General and Teniente Rey, of alcalde and
alcaide, of Santiago de Cuba and San Cristo-
bal de la Habana. The French under Jac-
ques Sores, and the English under Drake, sailed
over the horizon. In less than a second, the
expiration of a sigh, Diego de Velasquez and
Narvaez, Isabel de Bobadilla, Rojas and Guz-
man, the merchant Diego Perez in vain lay-
ing the guns of the Magdalena in defense of
the past, had gone. The Cedula from Ma-
drid, in eighteen hundred and twenty-five, be-
gan the conspiracies, Tacon came and went,
the fiscals beat free colored men to death and
entertained the negro women naked at balls.
The Lopez rebellion was followed by the ten
years' war of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight
and the peace of Zanjon, the great rebellion
and Weyler.
There remained now the indefinite sea and
a city withdrawn, secretive, made vaguely
beautiful by intangible voices, all its voices
[81]
San Cristobal de la Habana
that had laughed and shouted, whispered and
cried ; and by the towers and walls merged in
a single pattern, the old and the new drawn
together by an aspect of impermanence, freed
from the deceptive appearance of solidity.
Suddenly its history had been shown to me in
a flash of emotion, a mood of feeling. I
hadn't come to Cuba ignorant of the land, but
I had determined to slight what was but writ-
ten inanimate fact I had no disposition for
instruction: books were powerless to create La
Punta for me, it must bear its own credentials
... it might become, to my uncertain ad-
vantage, as important as a Daiquiri cocktail,
as a Larranaga cigar, but hardly more.
In any other case I should have cheated my-
self, not only of pleasure, the relaxation possi-
ble to honesty of mind, but of any hope of fu-
ture material. The creative habit was the
most tireless and frugal in existence : there was
nothing no experience, person, disillusion-
ment, or pain not endlessly sounded for its
every note and meaning. No one could pre-
[82]
San Cristobal de la Habana
diet what would be indispensable, just as it
was impossible to foresee, in the projection of
a novel, where its fine moments occurred.
And, returning to the descriptive and histori-
cal books on Cuba, left so largely unread at
the Inglaterra, it was probable that they had
omitted, in their effort for literal and conven-
tional emphasis, what might in their subject be
vivifying to me.
This, 'however, was beyond spoiling a his-
tory so picturesque, as I have intimated, that
its very vividness, its commonest phases, had
become the threadbare material of obvious
romance. But, outside of all that, the other
Havana, the mid- Victorian Pompeii, a city
that none could have predicted or told me of,
offered the incentive of its particular and rare
charm. In the Parque Maceo, on the sea
wall, my imagination stirred with the first
beginnings of a story: it would take place in
the period when the avaricious grip of Spain
was loosening, a story of secret patriotism and
the idealism of youth, set in marble salons, at
[83]
San Cristobal de la Habana
the opera and the cafes. It would not concern
itself with any love except the fidelity between
two men, a story of friendship.
There it would be different from The Ar-
row of Gold and Dona Rita; no peignoirs,
thank you, but a formality, a passionate pro-
priety, in keeping with the social gravity and
impersonal devotion of the very young.
There must be crinoline would I never es-
cape from that! and candelabra with glitter-
ing prisms; Spanish soldiers in striped linen
and officials with green-tasselled canes. My
youth, he'd come from the United States,
would have his little dinners at the Restaurant
Frangai-se, in Cuba Street number seventy-two,
and his refrescos at the Cafe Dominica. In
the end he'd leave Havana, having accom-
plished nothing but the loss of his illusions for
the gain of a memory like a dream, but his
friend, a Cuban I had seen him that first
night at dinner in the Inglaterra would be
killed. How . . .
It was time to go back to the hotel, and the
story receded. I walked too far on Belascoin
[84]
San Cristobal de la Habana
Street, all the way to Salud; and, past the Ta-
con Market, came out on the Parque de Colon,
where now there was a hot dusty wind, like a
localized sirocco, and I was glad to reach my
room. The reflection of the colored glass
above the window was hardly discernible on
the tiles; the interior was permeated by a{
shadow which made the ceiling appear high
beyond computation ; and my wardrobe trunk,
standing open, exhibited a rack of limp neck-
ties. I turned again to the novels on the table
and again let them drop, unattended, from a
listless hand. Tepid water! And I won-
dered a constant subject with me when
we should have a new vigorous American lit-
erature, a literature absolutely native, by men
who had not, like myself, been to school to
Turgenev and the English lyrical poetry.
Henry James had found the United States
lacking in background ; the lack was evident,
but not in the country of -his birth.
This was not a complaint against The Vel-
vet Glove except as it equally applied to me;
but an intense desire for a fresh talent, an
San Cristobal de la Habana
ability to which we could, without reserve,
take off our hats. The fact hit me that I was
forty, although it was still the fashion among
reviewers to speak of me as a promising young
man, and that there were patches of grey hair
on my temples. Yet I had been, everything
considered, remarkably successful; there was
no need for sentimental regret, a trait of men-
tal feebleness.
I decided to do something positive that
evening, to go to the theatre, or, if it were
playing, to see the Jai Alai. The latter was
possible, and, by way of the Telegrafo, I
reached the Hotel Florida for dinner; a res-
taurant which, because of the windows look-
ing down on it, had the pleasant individual
air of a courtyard. The music played, diners
came and went, and I gazed up at the shallow
balconies in the hopefulness of an incorrigible
imagination. The Fronton Jai Alai in Ha-
vana the game, pelota, had taken the title of
its court was a long way from Obispo Street,
but I knew when we had reached it by the
solid volume of shouting that escaped from
[86]
San Cristobal de la Habana
the high concrete building into the dim neigh-
borhood.
* # #
Inside, the court was an immense expanse
with granite-laid walls, a long rectangle, one
side of which was formed by the steeply
banked rows of spectators. Regular spaces
were marked by white lines on the playing
floor, and at one end the score was hung
against the names of the players, now two
teams the Azules and the Blancos. The
boxes were above the cement ledges packed
with standing men, by a promenade, where the
betting was conducted, cigars sold, and a small
active bar maintained. It was the night of
a gala benefit, for the Damas de Caridad, and
I had been fortunate in getting a single box
seat. I was late, though, and the game pro-
gressing; still, I was the first in our railed
space ; but the others, who proved to be Amer-
icans, soon followed three prosperous men,
manufacturers I thought, with wives in whom
native good taste had been given the oppor-
tunities of large resources.
[87]
San Cristobal de la Habana
One of the women who, in the arrangement
of the box, sat beside me smiled with a mag-
netism that 'had easily survived the loss of her
youth ; she was rather silent than not, but the
rest swept into a conversation in their best
public manner. A man accompanying them,
it developed, knew Cuba and Jai Alai, and he
secured for the amusement of the others a
cesta, the basket-like racquet worn strapped to
the arm. It was from him I discovered that
the court was two hundred aad ten feet long
and thirty-'six feet wide; while the service con-
sisted in dropping the ball and, on its rebound,
catching it in the cesta and throwing it against
the far end wall. From there, with a s'harp
smack audible all over the Fronton, the ball
shot back, if not a fault, within a marked area,
and one of the opposing side caught it, in the
air or on the first bounce, and returned it
against the end wall. At first I could see
nothing but the violent activity of the players,
frozen into statuesque attitudes of throwing;
vigorous figures in, mostly, White, with soft
red silk sashes. I heard the ball hit, and -saw
[88]
San Cristobal de la Habana
it rolling out of play; and then, with some
slight realization of the rapidity of its flight,
I was able to follow the course from cesta to
wall and floor.
There had never been, I was certain, an-
other game in which instantaneous judgment,
skill, and endurance had been carried to such
a far point. There was seldom a fault or er-
ror; the ball, flying like a bullet, was caught
and flung with a single gesture; again and
again it carried from one end wall to the
other, from which it was hurled on. Angles
of flight were calculated and controlled, the
long side wall was utilized. . . . Then a
player of the Azules was hit in the ankle, and
the abruptness with which he went down
showed me a possibility I had ignored.
During this the clamor of the audience was
indescribable, made up, for the most part, of
the difficulties of constantly shifting odds and
betting. The odds changed practically with
every passage of the ball: opening at, say,
five to three against the favorites, as they drew
steadily ahead in a game of twenty-five points
[89]
San Cristobal de la Habana
it jumped to eight to four, ten to three, any-
thing that could be placed. On the floor a
small company of bookmakers, distinguished
by their scarlet caps, shouted in every direc-
tion, and betting paper was thrown adroitly
through the air in hollow rubber balls. Those
who had backed at favorable odds the team
low far ahead were yelling jubilantly, and
Dthers were trying, at the expense of their
lungs, to cover by hedging their probable
losses.
There was, 'however, toward what should
have been the end, an unlooked-for develop-
ment the team apparently hopelessly behind
crept up. An astounded pause followed, and
then an uproar rose that cast the former sound
into insignificance. Soon the score was prac-
tically tied : there were shrill entreaties, basso
curses, a storm of indiscriminate insults.
Now the backers of the lesser couple scram-
bled vocally to take advantage of the betting
opportunities forever lost the odds were
even, then depressed on the other side. When
the game was over the noise died instantly:
[90]
San Cristobal de la Habana
men black with passion, shaking with rage,
crushing their 'hats or with lifted clenched
fists, at once conversed with smiling affability.
My eyes had been badly strained, and I was
glad to leave the box and stroll along the
promenade. The betting counters were
jammed by the owners of winning tickets, the
men behind the bar were, in their own way,
as active as the pelota players.
The majority of the boxes were occupied
by Cuban families, but yet there was an ap-
preciable number of foreigners. A slender
girl, in a low dinner dress, was sitting on the
railing of her box, swinging a graceful slipper
and smoking a cigarette New York was in-
delibly stamped on her and, among the mas-
culine world of Spanish antecedents, she cre-
ated a frank center of interest. For her part,
she studied the crowd quite blocking the way
below her with a cold indifference, the per-
sonification of young assured arrogance.
A quiniela followed, with six contestants,
one against the other in successive pairs; but
my eyes were now definitely exhausted by the
[91]
San Cristobal de la Habdna
necessarily shifting gaze, and my interest fast-
ened on the woman beside me. She was at
once intimately attached to the people with her
and abstracted in bearing: a woman not far
from fifty, but graceful still and, in a flexible
black silk crepe with a broad girdle of jet, still
desirable. It seemed to me that, in spite of an
admirable manner, she was a little impatient
at the volubility around her; or it might be,
in contradiction to this, she was exercising a
patience based on fortitude. It was clear that
she hadn't a great deal in common with the
man who had evidently been married to her
for a considerable length of years. They
spoke little it was he who had fetched the
cesta both immersed in individual thoughts.
A woman, I decided, finely sensitive, superior;
who, as she had grown older, had found no
demand for the qualities which she knew to
be her best.
A painful situation, a shocking waste,
from which, for her, there was no escape, for
she had patently what was known as character.
She at once was conscious of the absolute need
[92]
San Cristobal de la Habana
for spiritual freedom and bound by commit-
ments paramount to her self-esteem. But
even if she had been more daring, less consci-
entious, what could she have gained; what
was there for her in a society condemned to
express the spirit in the terms of flesh? She
had too much charm, too great a vitality, to be
absorbed in the superficial affairs of women,
the substitute life of charity. And once mar-
ried, probably to a man the model of kindly
faith, she was caught in a desert of sterile
monotony. Even children, I could see, if
they existed, had not slain her questioning at-
tractive personality.
She smiled at me again, later, her narrow
slightly wasting hands clasped about a knee
a smile of sympathetic comprehension and un-
quenchable woman. She would have been
happier chattering in the obvious strain of
stupidity behind her: any special beauty was
always paid for in the imposed loneliness of a
spoken or unspoken surrounding resentment
To be content with a facile compliment, the
majority of tricks at auction bridge, mechani-
[93]
San Cristobal d'e la Habana
cal pleasures, was the measure of wisdom for
women in her situation. The last quiniela
over, plainly weary she gathered a cloak about
her shoulders and left the box, without, as I
had hoped, some last gesture or even a word :
and I pictured her sitting listlessly, distraught,
in the cafe to which they were proceeding.
The pelota immediately vanished from my
mind before the infinitely more fundamental
and interesting problem of marriage; and
remembering the ominous sign of a woman's
club on the Malecon I wondered if the Cu-
ban women were contented with the tradition
as it had been handed down to them. In the
life that I knew in the north, an infinitesimal
grain of sand irritating in the body of the
United States, the sacredness of matrimony
had waned very seriously; it would, of course,
go on, probably for ever, since no other ar-
rangement could be thought of conciliating
the necessities of both dreams and property;
but, subjected to the scrutiny of intelligence
[94]
San Cristobal de la Habana
rather than sentimentality, it seemed both im-
potent and foolish. The impotence certainly,
for whereas my grandfather had thirteen chil-
dren and my mother four or was it five?
I had none. There had always been individ-
uals unrestrained by the complicated oaths of
the wedding service a strictly legal proceed-
ing to which the church had been permitted to
add its furbelows dissatisfied ladies, and gen-
tlemen of the commercial road. I wasn't re-
ferring to them, but to the look, at once puz-
zled, humorous, and impatient, that lately I
had seen wives of probity turn on their hus-
bands.
They expressed the conviction that the
purely masculine aphorism to the effect that
home was the place for women meant nothing
more than a clearing of the decks for un-
restricted action. This was beautifully dis-
played, confirmed, in Havana, where decks
were without a single impediment; and I spec-
ulated about the attitude of the Cuban women
in houses barred with both actual and meta-
phorical iron. Tradition weighed heavily on
[95]
San Cristobal de la Habana
their outlook; but there was that club on the
Malecon. Tradition had bound the farm
wives of Pennsylvania, yet they were progres-
sively rebelling against the insanity of endless
labor and isolation. But, perversely, the mar-
ried groups I saw in Havana were remarkably
close, simple, and happy. They sat in rows
at the concerts on the plazas, went off on small
excursions, in entire harmony a thing impos-
sible to the born American, with whom such
parties began in exasperation and ended in
nervous exhaustion. An American husband,
of the class largely evident in Havana, es-
corted his family abroad with truculence and
an air of shame at being exposed in such a
ridiculous situation. If there was more than
one household implicated, the men invariably
drew away together: there was a predomi-
nance of cursing and the wails of irritably
smacked children. The truth was that the cit-
izens of the United States, in their feverish
passage through life, had decidedly a poor
time either restlessness or ambition or dis-
satisfaction destroyed their peace of mind.
[96]
San Cristobal de la Habana
Labor, more highly paid than at any other
place or time, got less satisfaction for its
money than a Cuban mestizo with a peseta.
My thoughts returned abruptly to the point
where they had started, to marriage, and I
hoped that Cuba wouldn't be disorganized by
the present ferment; that the feminine element,
discovering their wrongs, wouldn't leave their
balconies and patios for the dusty publicity of
the street. Already a decline had been suf-
fered, first in the loss of mantillas and combs,
next in the passing of single-horse victorias for
unrestrained tin locomotives, and then in the
hideous flood of electric lighting. Still, a
great deal of the charm, the empire, of Ha-
vana women remained ; while nothing but ut-
ter disaster approached them from the north.
This was no new position for me, and it had
never failed to be attacked, usually with the
insinuation that, spiritually, I was part of
Turkey in Asia ... a place of gardens where
it was not inconceivable that I'd be happy:
certainly the politics there were no worse than
those to which I had been inured from birth,
[97]
San Cristobal de la Habana
with murder on the streets at noon distin-
guished by a white ribbon in its buttonhole.
The Armenians were no more precariously sit-
uated than the Albigenses under Innocent III.
I had heard, as well, that the governments of
Cuba had not been free from suspicion, but it
was hoped that elections supervised from the
United States would institute reform. Rare
irony! Elections, I should have said, going
back once more to the beginning, opening to
emancipated women.
Gathering, in imagination, all the feminine
world of Havana into a fragrant assembly, I
begged them not to separate themselves from
their privileges; I implored them even
against my personal inclination, for there, at
least, I was no Turk not to grow slender, if
that meant agile excursions into loud spheres
of lesser influence. Those others, I pro-
ceeded, would rapturously exchange a ballot
for a seductive ankle, a graceful breast, or a
flawless complexion. Complexion, or rather
its absence, brought immeasurably more sup-
porting votes to the women's party than con-
[98]
San Cristobal de la Habana
victions. And I added, reprehensibly, some
of the things I had been privately told, as a
writer, by women newly in the professions:
I exposed the secret of a lecturer on civic im-
provement or it might have been better ba-
bies; I couldn't recall which who carried a
handbagful of apostrophies to Paolo and
Francesca, and that illogical lot, on her trav-
els. She permitted me to read them in a
sunny orchard where the apples were already,
more than ripe, on the ground; and her gaze
had persistently strayed to the wasting fruit.
The audience melted away I was unable to
discover if they were flattered or annoyed
and I found myself actually seated at one of
the small tables on the fringe of the the dansant
at the Sevilla. The Cascade Orchestra from
the Biltmore, their necks hung with the imi-
tation wreaths of Hawaii, were playing a mu-
sical pastiche of many lands and a single pur-
pose; and there, foxtrotting intently among
girls from the New York Follies and girls on
follies of their own, colliding with race track
touts from Jefferson Park and suave predatory
[99]
San Cristobal de la Habana
gentlemen of San Francisco, I found a whole
section of young Cuba.
They returned, in the intermissions, to chap-
erons complacent or secretly disturbed, where
they 'had, principally, refrescos; but their atti-
tude was one of progress and conscious, pat-
ronizing superiority to old-fashioned customs.
The daughters of what, in many aspects, was
the Spanish-Cuban aristocracy of the island,
were dancing publicly in a hotel. Here, al-
ready, was an example of emancipation. I
disliked it, naturally, not on moral grounds,
but because it foreshadowed the destruction
of individuality, the loss, eventually, of Ha-
vana, of Cuba, of Spain ... of everything
distinguished that saved the world from mo-
notony.
They danced the Cuban youth with no-
table facility, adding to the hesitation waltz
something specially their own, a more intense
rhythm, a greater potentiality; their bodies
were at once more fluid and positive; they
were swept up into a mood unknown to the
adamant ornaments of Country Club veran-
[100]
San Cristobal de la Habana
das in the north. A cosmopolitan waiter,
anxious to have me finish and move on, hov-
ered about the table, ignorant of a traditional
courtesy as well as of the requirements of the
climate. All the objectionable features of
Broadway cafes, of public ostentation, min-
gled servility and insolence, dishonesty my
pina colado was diluted beyond taste were
being flung, with the air of a favor, into Ha-
vana. Although, for the best, I was even then
a little late, I was glad that I had seen the city
when I did, just as I was glad to have known
Venice before the Campanile fell, and the
Virginia Highlands when they had not been
modernized. The change of Havana within
itself, from palm thatch to marble, was en-
trancing; but the arbitrary imposition of stu-
pid habits, standards, conduct, from outside,
damnable.
In the end the waiter was more forceful
than my determination to remain until my
drink and thoughts were at an end, and I rose
with them uncompleted, in a very ill temper.
If Cuba hadn't enough innate taste and nation-
[101]
San Cristobal de la Habana
ality to save -herself, she must go the popular
way to obliteration. So much else had gone !
But later, at the Hotel de Luz, untouched yet
by the hand of imported cupidity, my happi-
ness in Havana returned.
The Hotel de Luz, inimitably Cuban, with
the shipping lying vaguely behind an orderly
foliage at the Muelle outside, had a dining-
room partly divided by wooden screens that
merged informally into the surrounding halls
and spaces, and an air that was an accumula-
tion of tradition, like an invisible film lying
over everything. A multiplication of unex-
pected adventitious detail accomplished, in its
entity, the strangeness, at once enticing and
a little sinister, characteristic of Havana.
There was, lurking about, in the darker cor-
ners and passages, a feeling almost of dread,
uncomfortable to meet. And, exploring, I
passed a room without windows, largely the
color of dried blood, the quintessence of a
nightmare. The third floor, laid in a tri-
[102]
San Cristobal de la Habana
angle of, perhaps, ninety degrees, raised im-
mense corridors paved in black and white mar-
ble blocks, down the long perspective of which
moving figures were reduced to furtive man-
nikins and voices were lost in an upper mur-
mur.
I sat, for a while, in a walnut rocking chair
at an end of the sweep, which amazed me by
an architecture the impressiveness of which
approached oppression. A wall was broken by
a file of slatted doors, and from one of these
came the minute irritable clatter of a type-
writer; the bell at the finish of a line sounded
like the shiver of a tapped glass, and a child
spoke. It was difficult to think of the Hotel
de Luz as a place of normal residence, as
existing at all except in the mental fantasias
of Piranesi it resembled exactly one of his
sere vertiginous engravings. Yet it was, I
knew, the favorite hotel of travelers from the
Canary Islands.
Continuing to rock slightly and smoke, I
pursued the extremely recondite subject of
just such impressions as I had there received:
[103]
San Cristobal de la Habana
a very important inquiry, for it had to do with
the secret, the unintelligible heart, of my writ-
ing. There was, obviously, in the Hotel de
Luz nothing intrinsically terrifying, strange.
My attitude toward it would be dismissed as
absurd by the Canary Islanders. But the ef-
fect it produced on me was tangible, ponder-
able; it tyrannized over my imagination and
drove it into corridors of thought as sombre as
that in reality before me. I had seen the Pir-
anesi engravings when I was very young and
painfully susceptible to mental darkness and
fears ; and they ,had undoubtedly left their in-
delible mark . . . now brought out by the
black and white marble -squares diminishing
with the walls in parallel lines.
The reality of what I felt, then, lay in the
combining of the surroundings and my imagi-
nation a condition, a result, if not unique, at
least unlikely to be often repeated. The sum
of another emotional experience and the Hotel
de Luz would be totally different, but equally
true with my own; and from that confusion
misunderstanding arose. The actuality was
[104]
San Cristobal de la Habana
neither concrete nor subjective; yet, woven of
these double threads, it was absolute. The in-
dividuality of places and hours absorbed me ;
there was no word in English to express my
meaning the perception of the inanimate
moods of place. It belonged, rather than to
the novel, to the painter, and possibly occu-
pied too great a space in my pages. Certainly
houses and night and hills were often more
vivid to me than the people in or out of them.
But it was no longer possible, if it had ever
been, to disentangle one from the other, the
personal from what seemed the impersonal;
for, while nature was carelessly free from
beauty and sentiment and morals, it had been
invested with each of these qualities in turn by
a differently developing intelligence. The
elements of nature, partly in hand, were ar-
bitrarily and subconsciously projected in set
forms. I stopped to think how the mobility
of mind perpetually solidified, like cement,
about itself; how fluid ideas, aspirations, al-
ways hardened into institutions, then prisons,
then mortuary vaults. Religion 'had done this
San Cristobal de la Habana
signally, both profoundly and superficially
it was impossible to picture the faith of John
Fox under the frescoes of La Merced Church,
a Methodist exuberance in St. Michael's at
Richmond ; the Roman ritual was as much a
thing of its silver altars as the Episcopal
Church in Virginia depended on historic com-
munion services and austere box pews.
Not only was I specially intent on these
values : my inability to see men as free from
them, as spiritual conquistadores, had been a
cause of difficulty in the popularity and sale
of my books. I lacked both the conceptions
of man as an Atlas, holding up the painted
globe, or an individual mounting securely into
perpetuity. If the latter were true, if there
were no death, the dignity of all the great
tragic moments of life and art, the splendor of
sacrifice, was cheapened to nothing. I would
have gladly surrendered these for the privi-
lege of continued existence in a sphere not
dominated by hymnology but, skeptical of
the future, all I possessed, my sole ideal, was a
passionate admiration for the courage of a hu-
[106]
San Cristobal de la Habana
manity condemned to the loss of warm life.
I had grown more serious than I intended,
than, in Havana, was necessary; what I had
set out to discover was simply the explanation
of my feeling about the Hotel de Luz; but
undoubtedly it was better for me to accept
emotions, merely to record them, than attempt
analysis.
I had had very little schooling in proc-
esses of exact thought, practically no men-
tal gymnastics. But this was not an imposed
hardship on which I looked back with regret
I had been free to fill my life with scholas-
tic routine, but balked absolutely: in class
rooms a blankness like a fog had settled over
me, from which, after a short half-hearted
struggle, I emerged to follow what, name-
lessly, interested me. That, for example, was
precisely the manner of my stay in Havana.
A course for which the worst was predicted,
specially since I persisted in writing. And I
could see how I'd be censured by the frugal-
minded for such a book as I was more than
likely to bring to San Cristobal de la Habana.
[107]
San Cristobal de la Habana
There was, in reality, no practical reason
to write about it at all, since it had been ad-
mirably and thoroughly described, the sights,
pleasures, and sounds, in reputable and lauda-
tory paragraphs, a source of pride to the na-
tives. Here no one could predict, in my
search, What would seem important, to be tran-
scribed the colored glass above a window,
the sugar at the bottom of a cocktail and my
moral -sense, of course, would be as impotent
as my political position was negligible. Yet
the qualities ignored by a more solemn intel-
ligence than mine were precisely what formed
the spirit of Havana; their comprehension
was necessary to that perception of an inani-
mate mood of place.
I was constantly in a disagreement with the
accepted opinion of what were, at bottom, the
more serious facts, the determining pressures
of existence; and it had always been at the
back of my head to write a novel built from
just such trivialities as, it seemed to me, enor-
mously affected human fate. A very absorb-
ing idea that had gone as far as an introduc-
[108]
San Cristobal de la Habana
tion called A Preface of Imperishable Trifles ;
but the realization that I had begun in that
manner a suspicious circumstance in a novel,
where no shadow of an explanation, a justifi-
cation, was permissible, led me to put it away.
It was the serious defect of the novel that it
commonly resembled the mechanism of an in-
genious lock in which the key turned smoothly
for the flinging open, at the appropriate mo-
ment, of a door upon a tableau of justice. It
lacked almost entirely the fatalities of sheer
chance, of inconsiderable accidents, which
gave life its characteristic insecurity.
I had left the Hotel de Luz for echoing
stone galleries and streets and empty paved
plazas when I told myself that mine would
have simply been a story of shifted em-
phasis, for which I should have used my
own memories, since I recalled the wall-
paper of a music room after thirty years
more clearly than the details of my father's
death, happening when I was practically
mature. The unavoidable conclusion of this
was that the paper, in a way I made no pre-
[109]
San Cristobal de la Habana
tence to explain, bore upon me more deeply
than my father ; and, with that in view, it was
perhaps as well that the story had remained
unwritten.
# * *
Some of these considerations returned to my
mind the following afternoon, when my fancy
had been captured by a woman on a balcony
of the Malecon. The house was small,
crushed between two imposing structures that
had been residences but were now apartments,
scarcely two stories and set back of the line,
with the balcony at a lower window. The
woman was neither young nor lovely, but,
folded in a shawl, it might have been one of
the lost mantillas, she was invested with a
melancholy dignity. It was possible, in the
briefest passage, to see not only her history
but the story of a decade, of a vanished great-
ness lingering through a last afternoon before
extinction a gesture of Spain finally sub-
merged in the western seas of skepticism.
I was extraordinarily grateful to her for
standing wrapped with the shawl in immobile
[no]
San Cristobal de la Habana
sadness. That was all I wanted from her, the
most indeed, she could give: apart from the
balcony, hurrying along the street with the
black lace drawn closely about her head, she
would have been meaningless. The hour in
which I saw her, too, the swiftly fading radi-
ance, had its inevitable part in the effect she
produced. I had, I realized, no wish to re-
store her to either youth or happiness, I didn't
want to improve her, or the case of Spain, in
any way; she was perfect for my purpose, so
eminently selfish, as she was. In begging, in
imagination, the women of Havana to remain
on their balconies, I hadn't given a thought to
their welfare or desires.
The truth was that I regarded them as a
part of their iron grilling, figures on a canvas,
the balconies and women inseparable from
each other. It might well be that this was no
more than the intolerable oppression of the
past incongruously thrust upon the present, and
that at any minute the women, in righteous in-
dignation and revolt, would step down into
life. But if they were to do that, I hoped it
[mi
San Cristobal de la Habana
would be put off until I had returned to the
land of the feminine free; I didn't want to be
present when the balconies were definitely de-
serted for the publicity of the Sevilla. I
should regret their loss heavily, those points of
vantage gracefully ranged across the brilliant
facades of Havana. For there was no other
city where balconies were so universal, so
varied, and so seductive. I recalled a bal-
cony high over the Rond Point de Plain-pal-
ais, in Geneva, where, on the left, could be
seen the blue line of the Jura and on the right,
through the mounting Rue de Carouge, the
abrupt green cliff of the Salve. Curiously,
there were a great many balconies in Geneva
giving on many beautiful prospects the
Promenade des Bastions and La Treille, the
Cite and bridged water; but they were no
more than pleasant, they had no deep signifi-
cance whatever. The balconies of Charleston
were rather galleries turned privately on gar-
dens and not upon the streets ; while those over
the banquettes of New Orleans, of the vieux
San Cristobal de la Habana
carre, ! had Jong ago been emptied of their
flowered muslins.
The popularity of balconies, their purpose,
had remained, until now at least, largely un-
changed in Havana. On Sol Street, in the
neighborhood of Oficios and where it met the
harbor, they solidly terminated their tall win-
dows, reached the heights of discreet tradition.
There the way was so narrow that a head
above must be bent forward to see what was
passing, affording a clear view of high comb
and bright lips, provocative in the intimacy of
their suggestion. The balconies of the Male-
co'n looked out, conversely, across the un-
broken tide of the sea in the afternoon, when
it was fair, a magical sweep of unutterable
blue. Yet they had suffered a decline as
though the constant noise of automobiles had
rent an evanescent spirit.
The women there might see, as they chose,
either the parade of fashion or the grey walls
and the far horizon ; but from the balconies of
the Prado only the former was visible, the
San Cristobal de la Habana
whirling motor cars and the pedestrians in the
rows of India laurels. Here the balconies
through the early and late evening were
crowded; the chatter, the gesticulations and
smiles, evident on the street. The clothes,
however, were no longer Spanish in charac-
teristic detail, but Parisian ; while the essential
atmosphere, the color, of the balconies re-
mained. In carnival I had just missed it
they were hung with serpentine and ex-
changed bombardments of roses and compli-
ments with the street; but now their fastness,
except to the flutter of a hand, was absolute.
I saw a group of girls at an impressive win-
dow of the Prado, on the corner of either
Trocadero or Colon Street, all in white ex-
cept for the clear scarlet of one, like a blaz-
ing camellia among gardenias; and, for a day
after, their dark loveliness stayed in my mind.
They had had tea, probably, in the corner of
a high cool room with a marble floor, fur-
nished in pale gilt. I had no doubt that a
piano had been played for a brief explana-
tory dancing, the trial of new steps neither
San Cristobal de la Habana
French nor Spanish, but American. Some of
them, I knew, had been at school in New
York probably Miss Spence's, where bal-
conies were not cultivated and I wondered
what they thought about the Havana to which
they had returned. Well, if the Cuban men,
the fathers and suitors and husbands, pre-
ferred to keep the historic architecture of their
society, of their climate, a convent of some
Sacred Heart would be wiser than a cele-
brated American finishing school.
The New York scene, however carefully
veiled and chaperoned, was a disquieting
preparation for the Prado, or even Vedado.
What the life on an estancia was, I couldn't
imagine; I had been told that, for a woman,
oftener than not, it was still a model of Cas-
tilian rigidity. It had, in fact, been suggested
to me that I write the -story of such a girl, shut
away from everything that she had been per-
mitted to see and desire. Unquestionably a
splendid subject, one of the vessels that would
hold everything an ability could pour into it.
I realized at once which, in that individual
San Cristobal de la Habana
struggle, must conquer the heredity of Cuba
would be more powerful than an isolated fem-
inine need. The other women, the elders,
who surrounded her, would be as relentless as
any husband, and in the end she'd become fat
and listless.
Widely different balconies held my at-
tention on, one, flooded with the morning
sun, two women with carnation cheeks and
elaborately dressed hair, but for the rest strik-
ingly informal, laughed an invitation to me
that took no account of the hour. They were,
I suppose, tawdry, the cheap familiars of a
cheap street; but the gay orange wall where
they lounged like the painted actors of a zar-
zuela, their yellow satin slippers and should-
ers impudently bare above chemises pink and
blue, all gave them a certain distinction.
Again, in the section of Jesus del Monte, there
were buildings brilliantly and impossibly
painted, usually with cafes on the ground,
whose balconies, exposed to an intolerable
heat, overlooked dingy sun-baked fields.
They were always empty. . . .1 could never
[116]
San Cristobal de la Habana
imagine their use for there was not only
nothing to see, but no one to be seen by. The
houses of Havana, admirable in the closeness
of the city, possible in a bougainvillia-smoth-
ered suburb, were depressingly inappropriate
to any contact with the country. They were
lost, detached or strayed away from their fel-
lows; for the happy plan of the country house
was that of exposure to all the favorable winds
that blew, to verandas and open halls rather
than balconies and patios: it was merged into
vistas and not relentlessly and jealously shut on
every face.
A fact that had nothing to do with the trop-
ics or the outskirts of Havana, where wide
dusty stone avenues dropped abruptly in soft
roads, and the balconies were added purely
from habit. My own balcony, at the Hotel
Inglaterra, was ideally placed, with its com-
mand of an angle of the Parque Central. I
often sat there before dinner, or past the mid-
dle of night; there was always, then, a wind
stirring over San Rafael Street; but the bal-
conies on either side of me, above and below,
San Cristobal de la Habana
were invariably empty, their purpose, it was
plain, mistrusted.
The patios of Havana, turned so uncompro-
misingly from the street, were, perhaps for
that reason, even more engaging than the bal-
conies. I saw them, except those of the gov-
ernment buildings and others semi-public,
through opening or half open doors, or some-
times I looked down into them from superior
heights. They, too, were countless in variety,
from the merest kitchen areas and places of
heaped refuse to lovely garden rooms of flow-
ers and glazed tiling and fountains. This
sense of privacy, of enclosure, in a garden was
their most charming feature; and the possi-
bilities and implications of a patio created a
whole social life with which I was necessarily
unfamiliar. They were, usually, in the hours
I knew them, empty but for passing servants
. . . obviously their time was late afternoon
or evening: fixed to the inner walls were the
iron brackets of lamps, and it was easy to
[118]
San Cristobal de la Habana
imagine them dimly lighted and flooded
with perfume, with the scent of magnolias and
the whisper of the fountains.
These details, separately, were not rare, but
shut into the masonry of Havana, their beauty
shown in momentary glimpses on streets of
blank walls, their fragrance drooping into un-
expected barren places, the patios stirred my
inherent desires. As usual, I didn't want to
be gazing at them from without, but to be a
part of their existence: I wanted to sleep on
one, in a room nothing but a stone gallery, or
watch the moonlight slip over the leaves of the
crape myrtles and the tiles and sink into the
water. But not to-day, for there were dis-
cordant sounds through the arches with slen-
der twisted Moorish pillars the subdued
harshness of mechanical music, the echoes of
that dissatisfaction which was everywhere now
recognized as improvement. I demanded
guitars.
The masculine chords of the guitar, the least
sentimental of instruments, as the Spaniards
were the least sentimental of people, the deep
San Cristobal de la Habana
vibration of resinous stopped strings, was the
perfect accompaniment to that color visible
and invisible. Invisible! Always that, first
and most potent. The perpetuity of atmos-
phere through transmitted feeling was far
more absorbing than the other chimera, of in-
corruption. It was tradition, more than
moonlight, that steeped the patios with
kindled obscure romantic longings. Within
their formal squares they held the spirit of a
great history and of two great races, two con-
tinents. They, the patios, were the East in
the West, the Moroscos on the Peninsula.
The dress of the present, even the floating
films of the women, was misplaced; these
were, in reality, the courtyards of the Orient,
and they needed the dignity of grave robes and
gestures, bearded serenity. In them, initially,
women had been flowers lightly clasped with
bands of rubies and dyed illusory veils ; there
had been no guitars -then, but silver flutes.
However, I had no desire to be a part of that
time ; it was Spain that possessed me, and not
in Grenada but Cuba, during the Captain-
[120]
San Cristobal de la Habana
generalship of the Conde de Kiel a, in the sev-
enteen sixties when the British conquests un-
der Albemarle were returned to the island.
That was a period of building and prosperity,
the fortifications of San Carlos and Atares were
established, Morro and the Cabanas refash-
ioned, and the streets and houses of Havana
named and numbered. The decline of Spain,
a long imperceptible crumbling, had already
begun, but its effect was not visible in Cuba ;
there still was a Castilian arrogance burned
more brown, more vivid, by the Caribbean.
A little late for the plate ships sailing in
cloudy companies and filling Havana with the
swords of Mexico and Peru; but my mind and
inclinations were not heroic; I could dispdnse
with Pizarro's soldiers, fanciful with the orna-
ments of the Incas, for the quiet of walled
gardens, the hooped brocades of court dresses ;
all the transplanted grace of the city and hour.
Climate was greater than man, and the first
Cubenos, dead in the mines of Cobre, were
being revenged for the usurpation of their
happiness and land; the negroes of the slave
[121]
San Cristobal de la Habana
trade, too, were repaying their chains to the
last link of misery. But these counter in-
fluences were not perceptible yet in the patios,
just as the French Revolution had still to scat-
ter the polite pastorals only to survive in the
canvases of Boucher and Watteau.
It was, in Havana as well as Seville, the
farewell of true formality, for after that it
became only a form. No one, afterwards,
was to bow instinctively as he left a room or
dance to the measures of Beethoven and Mo-
zart. A useless plant cut down by a rusty
scythe! The elegance of Cuba, however,
changing into later Victorianism, was, in the
time of de Ricla, greatly enhanced by its sur-
rounding, by the day before yesterday when
there had been only thatched bohios where
now were patios of marble. Those quiet
spaces were sentient with all this, just as the
patios of the churches -held the sibilant whis-
per of the sandals of -the Inquisition, an order
already malodorou-s and expelled from the is-
land by Antonio Maria Bucarely, the follow-
ing Captain-general.
[122]
San Cristobal de la Habana
But even yet it would be possible, with the
details carefully arranged, to find an" emo-
tional situation in a patio undisturbed since
the middle eighteenth century; for the re-
venge of the Cubenos and of Africa, of the red
and the black slaves, was that, with the faint
or full infusion of their bloods into their con-
querors, dwindled unintelligible desires and
dreamlike passions entered as well. A discol-
oration of the mind as actual as the darkening
of the skin! And I pictured an obscure im-
pulse buried in the personality of a sensitive
and reserved man, such a trait as, at moments
of extreme pressure, would betray him into a
hateful savagery; or it might be better brought
out by a galling secret barbarity of taste. The
Spain of Philip, primitive Africa, and a vir-
ginal island race constrained into one body
and spirit must be richly dramatic.
It was imperative to regard the patios in
such a light, with a strong infusion of reality,
for,half apprehended, they produced that thin
tinkling note of sham romance; they evoked,
for a ready susceptibility, the impressions of
San Cristobal de la Habana
opera bouffe . . . a danger constantly present
in my thoughts. As it was, I should be ac-
cused again of avoiding the actual and the dif-
ficult for an easy unreality; but there was at
least this to be said for what I had, in writing,
laid back in point of time no one had
charged me with an historical novel.
There was another, perhaps safer, attitude
toward the balconies and patios of Havana: to
regard them in an unrelieved mood of realism,
to show them livid with blue paint and echo-
ing with shrill misery, typhoid fever, and pov-
erty. If I did that, automatically a number of
serious critical intellects would give me their
withheld support, they would no longer re-
gard me as a bright cork floating thoughtlessly
over the opaque depths of life. Well, they
cou ld they'd have to go to the devil; for I
had my own honesty to serve, my own plot to
ten( j a plot, as I have said, where, knowing
the effort hopeless, I tried only to grow a
flower spray. If I could put on paper an ap-
ple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might
discuss the economy of the apples.
San Cristobal de la Habana
Or, in Havana, of the oranges. In the
meanwhile the patios gave me an inexhaustible
pleasure. Sometimes the walls were glazed
with tiles and the octagonal surface of the
fountain held the reflected tracery of bamboo,
while a royal palm towered over the balusters
of the roof and hanging lamps were crowned
with fretted metal. Another, with its flags
broken and the basin dry, was deserted except
for the soundless flame-like passage of chro-
matic lizards; still another was bare, with
solid deep arcades and shadows on the ground
and a second gallery of gracefully light arches.
There was, in one, a lawn-parasol in candy-
colored stripes with low wicker chairs and gay
cushions ; on a table some tall glasses elbowed
a syphon, English gin, and a silver dish of
limes, and a blue-and-yellow macaw was se-
cured to a black lacquer stand.
That, evidently, was not characteristic of
Havana, and yet the city absorbed it, made it a
part of a complex richness, a complexity as
San Cristobal de la Habana
brilliantly blended as a rainbow. At first I
had been entranced by the sudden colorful dis-
play, it had seemed to be in one marvellously
high key ; but now I recognized that it was
composed of the entire scale, and that there
were notes profoundly dark. I should have
known that, for I had been, when I was much"
younger, a painter, and I had learned that
surfaces which seemed to be in one tone were
made up of a hundred. The city, of course,
was an accumulation of the men who had
made it, the women who had lived there ; and
it was possible that Havana had as intense and
varied a foundation as any place that had ex-,
is ted.
Not in the sense, the historical importance
of, for example, Athens; I had already said
that Havana was a city without history, which
was true in the cumulative, inter-human mean-
ing of that term. But it had, within its limits,
on its island like a flower in air, an amazing
and absorbing past In the beginning, where
Spain was concerned, Cuba, a fabulous land,
had promised fabulous gold ; but the empires
[126]
San Cristobal de la Habana
of the Aztecs and Peru, incalculably richer,
and the fatal dream of eternal youth in Flor-
ida, had robbed it of royal interest, of men,
food, and ships. It had settled back, lost to
most concern beyond a perfunctory colonial
administration, into a region of agriculture,
affected only indirectly by, and affecting not
at all, the universal upheaval elsewhere.
Within Havana itself, then, moulded by the
burning sun, the cooling night winds, and the
severing water, a peculiarly essential human
development had taken place. And its his-
tory was, for this reason, elusive, most difficult
to grasp; hopelessly concealed from a mere
examination of bastions.
One by one the colors of its fantastic design
grew clearer to me; period by period the
streets and people became intelligible, until
they reached the middle-century era to which
I was so susceptible. To arrive, with the in-
gredients of a tropical Spain and the pirates
of the world, at an early Victorianism was a
mystery which demanded a close investiga-
tion. That air enveloped all the center of the
San Cristobal de la Habana
city, its paseos and plazas and buildings, and
still influenced the social life. This, I finally
decided, came from the fact that the architec-
tural spirit which dominated Havana was of
the period before Eastlake; or at least I was
not familiar with any structures erected in
such a style, so lavishly marble, since then.
There was no absence of modernity in the
wharfs and streets, but that loud impetuous
tide poured through the ways of a quieter wa-
ter, and in the side passages the sound dimin-
ished. Havana was a great port, but the
steam shipping along its waterfront was in-
congruous with the low tranquil whiteness, the
pseudo-classicism, of the buildings that held
along the bay. The latter particular, elabor-
ated from my first impression, carried the city
back to the end of the eighteenth century and
the beginning of the nineteenth. I had no in-
tention of examining the dates of numerous
structures, but the stamp of their time was on
the Ionic entablatures. Then women, as well,
had copied in their dress the symbol of the
Greek column, of sculpture instead of paint-
San Cristobal de la Habana
ing, except for the charming and illogical in-
novation of turbans ; and they went about in
sandals and gowns falling straight from their
looped breasts. Such a figure, with her head
bound in vermilion, must have been enticing
in the great shaded bare rooms. There must
have been, too, an extraordinary assemblage
of negro pages and majordomos in ruby silks
and canary and velvet.
The feminine silhouette changed remark-
ably in thirty years, from a column to a cone,
from the ultimate in flowing lines to a bou-
quet-like rigidity; and the severity of furnish-
ings, of incidentals, expanded in queer elab-
orations. It was, notably, a period of pru-
dery, of all which, objectively, I disliked;
while at the same time there had been the un-
dercurrent of license that always accompanied
an oppressive hypocrisy. This, I could see,
was true of its age in Havana: men the real
prudes had been heavily whiskered at home
with a repressed morality, and betrayed in
another quarter by heredity and the climate.
Two periods that, except for some beautiful
[129]
San Cristobal de la Habana
books, had been steeped in an ugliness from
which the world had not recovered. Indeed,
while it was now fashionable to deride them,
the present was, in some ways, perceptibly
worse: Literature was, perhaps, bolder in
scope, but it showed hardly more than a sur-
prise at the sound of its comparative liberty
of speech. The art of painting had burst into
frantic fragments that might or might not
later be assembled into meaning; the architec-
ture had degenerated into nothing more than
skilful or stupid adaptation.
In the large disasters that were sweeping
the world, the mad confusion of injustice and
revolt, of contending privilege, the serene
primness of Havana, its starched formality -of
appearance, offered a priceless quietude. It
was, at once, static and mobile, a place of
countless moods that merged at the turning of
a corner, the shifting of a glance from La
Punta to the circular bandstand at the foot of
the Prado. Never pedantic, it was a city more
for the emotions than the intellect; intellect,
in its astigmatic conceit, had largely over-
San Cristobal de la Habana
looked Havana ; and Havana had missed little
enough. Its monuments and statues, where
they were complacently innocent of art, had
been brought into harmony of tone by the at-
mosphere vivid like the flambeau trees, the
inconceivable blueness of its sea. The colors
of the houses, glaringly or palely inappropri-
ate, were melted and bound into inevitable
rightness. Even the cemetery, frosted with
tombs like a monstrous iced cake, its shafts
that might have been the crystallized stalag-
mites of the caves of death, resembled noth-
ing more disturbing than the lacy pantalets
of the time it celebrated. It was the final ac-
complishment of mid-Victorian horror, with
its pit of mouldering bones and solemn ritual-
istic nonsense ; yet the thought of the ponder-
ous gold and black catafalques rolling in pro-
cession between the horizontal white slabs, of
the winking candles all the ghastly appen-
dages of religious undertaking and the
clergy in purple and fine cambric, with ame-
thyst rings on their fat or their thin fingers,
gave it the feeling of a remote mummery.
San Cristobal de la Habana
The cemetery from which I escaped with
relief and the cafe that I entered with pleas-
ure again the Telegrafo flowed together in
the city's general impression. I could see the
statue of Marti, and, as I looked, it changed
into the statue of Isabel; then that, too, van-
ished. The broad paved avenue, the flagged
walks, became a gravelled plaza about which
the girls promenaded in one direction to pass
constantly the youths circling in the other.
The vision flickered and died, and I went on
to lunch through the Havana of so many days
smoothly packed into one.
I felt that my first sense of instinctive fa-
miliarity had been justified; yet, in the cor-
ridor of the Inglaterra, asked by a traveler
how to get to a restaurant, the Dos Hermanos,
I was unable to reply; and a third American,
brushing me aside, gave him voluble instruc-
tions. It ended by his being taken out and
seated in a hack, while the other, in angry
execrable and fluent Spanish, told the driver
where to proceed. Whatever I had learned,
it seemed, was of no practical value ; my mul-
San Cristobal de la Habana
tiple sensations were not reducible to the sim-
plest demand. A woman passed with a copy
of an ultra popular novel, and this recalled the
long struggle of my early books for the small-
est recognition. If that dark frame of mind
had fastened on me in the north, it would have
burdened me for a day; but in Havana, with
the Marquis de Riscal and a For Larranaga,
I envied no mediocre novelist her stereotyped
laurels. It was impossible to get anywhere a
better wine or a cigar that changed more
soothingly from the brown of fact to blue
fancy.
The Cuban cigarettes, however, were too
strong for pleasure; for, while the preference
for a strong cigar was admissible, cigarettes
should be mild. All those famous were.
Strangely enough, good cigarettes had never
been smoked in the United States, a land with
an overwhelming preference for the cheap
drugged tobacco called Virginia. No one
would pay for a pure Turkish leaf; with the
San Cristobal de la Habana
exception of a few hotels and clubs it was not
procurable. There was a merchant on the
Zulueta with a large assortment of Cuban cig-
arettes, made in every conceivable shape and
paper, hebra and arroz and pectoral. They
had tips of gilt or silver paper, cork, straw, and
colored silks, and were packed in enticing
ways and odd numbers. But, after trying
their apparent variety, they all seemed alike,
as coarse and black in flavor as their tobacco.
There were, of course, men who disagreed
with me though women never liked a Ca-
banas or Henry Clay cigarette and a connec-
tion of mine, a judge, long imported from
Cuba, through Novotny of New York, the
Honoradez tobacco for his cigarettes. He
had been in Havana during the Spanish oc-
cupation, and later; and, recalling him, I
could see that he, like myself, possessed an in-
eradicable fondness for it In his case, even,
his memories might have affected his exterior,
for he had a lean darkness more appropriate
to the Calzada del Cerro than to Chester
County. In summer particularly, with his im-
San Cristobal de la Habana
maculate linens, and the brown cigarette cast-
ing a pungent line of smoke from his long sen-
sitive fingers, he was the image of a Spanish
colonial gentleman.
He had known Havana at a better time than
now, when it was more provincial, simpler;
the hotels then were uncompromisingly locked
at ten in the evening, and if he returned later
he was forced to call the negro sleeping in the
hall. I don't remember where he stayed
probably at the Inglaterra. I was young and
ignorant of Cuba when I saw him, with a cer-
tain frequency, before he died; and I heard his
talk about the Parque Central with no greater
interest than his discussions of salmon fishing,
of Sun and Planet reels and rods split and
glued. I realized sharply what I had missed,
both in the way of detail the detail most im-
portant to a mental picture and always missing
and in intimate understanding of Cuban af-
fairs. For he had a tonic mind, rare in Amer-
ica, unsentimental and courageous, and
touched with a satirical quality disastrous to
sham, social, religious, or political.
[135]
San Cristobal de la Habana
The cigarettes came to him in bright tin
boxes of a hundred; and, after his death, I
bought seven from Novotny and smoked the
contents almost by way of memorial; for he
was a personality of a type almost gone.
Judges of County Courts no longer wore im-
maculate high hats to the Bench, with the
vivid corner of a bandanna handkerchief
visible in the formality of their coat tails.
The silk-tipped cigarettes were for women,
but the silk was principally a villainous car-
mine, a color fatal to the delicate charm of
lips, and I hoped that I should see none so
thoughtless as to smoke them; while the
cigarettes all of -tobacco were, frankly, impos-
sible. Why, I couldn't say; they simply
wouldn't do. What women I saw smoking in
public, in the cafes and at the races, were not
Cubans. They, on view, neither smoked nor
drank anything but ref rescos. But a different
feminine world, at their doors or over the
counters of bodegas, enjoyed long formidable
cigars.
An amusing convention, a prejudice really;
San Cristobal de la Habana
an act, in women, condemned from the associa-
tions in men's minds, synonymous with that
gaiety they so painstakingly kept out of their
homes. Yet, in spite of them, women smok-
ing had become a commonplace in the United
States. In Havana men were still paramount
. . . and Victorian. On the Obispo cigarette-
cases from Toledo, of steel inlaid with gold,
were for sale; but I'd had experience with
Toledo work the steel rusted. For years I'd
bought cigarette cases and holders before I
finally learned that the former were a nuisance
and that the latter destroyed the flavor of
tobacco- I had owned cases in metal and
leather and silk, patented and plain, and one
by one they were mislaid and given away. I
had smoked with holders of ivory and jet and
tortoise shell, wood and amber and quills, and
they, too, had disappeared. All that could be
said for them was that they looked well and
saved the fingers from nicotine stains.
The Turkish cigarettes in Havana were un-
remarkable, yet, for the Cuban youth, the
sign of worldliness. They disdained the local
1*371
San Cristobal de la Habana
brands, but even Cuba was powerless to depre-
ciate her cigars, the best of all countries and
all times. Here was an accomplishment, a
possession, of unique importance and excel-
lence, for tobacco belonged to the irreducible
number of necessities. I had survived pro-
hibition, with the assistance of a forethought
unhappily limited in execution; but if the
absurdity of my country abolished tobacco, I
should be forced to move to England; that
would be too much. I could imagine, in this
case, what comments would appear in the
press, reminding the virtuous and patriotic
that my books had always been chargeable
with immorality and a blindness to the splen-
dor of our national ideals.
In the past I had suffered a particularly
wretched nervous breakdown it hit me like
a bullet in the Piazza della Principe in Flor-
ence; and when I had politely been sent to
Switzerland to die, an English doctor at
Geneva cured me, for most practical purposes,
by impatience, black coffee, and Shepherd's
Hotel cigarettes. I had no dorbt that smok-
San Cristobal de la Habana
ing was, in many ways, a very deleterious
habit; but life itself was a bad habit con-
demned to the worst of ends. I was, as well,
very apt to have little in common with men
who didn't smoke, or, I should say, with men
who had never smoked. They were, with
practically no exceptions, precisians, and ate,
lived, for their health rather than for the tang
of delicate sauces and sensations. And a
long while ago a wise and charming woman
had lamented to me the fact that all the gener-
osity and attractiveness she met in men be-
longed to what were colloquially called
drunks. . . . Her feeling was the same as
mine.
I wasn't 'defending drunkenness or attack-
ing the statistics against smokers ; what I felt,
I think, in such men was the presence of a
fallibility to which, at awkward or tragic mo-
ments, they yielded and so became companions
of sorrow and charity, the great temperers of
humanity. At any rate, I demanded enough
liberty, at least, to fill my system with smoke
if I willed. The possibility that my act might
[139]
San Cristobal de la Habana
hurt some one else failed to excite me why
should I bother with him when I wasn't con-
cerned about myself! There was too much
officious paternalism in the air, too many ad-
monitions and not enough lightness of heart
of tobacco heart if necessary.
In addition, I wasn't sure that I wanted to
be perfectly sanitary in mind and body, any
more than I was certain of the complete de-
sirability of a perfected world, of heaven.
At once, there, my lifelong occupation would
be gone novelists never stopped to think
what would happen to them if all the reforms
for which they shouted should go into effect;
and I had a disturbing idea that a great deal
of my pleasure in life came from feelings not
always admissible in, shall I say, magazines of
a general character. A clean mind and a
pure heart were not without chilling sugges-
tions of emotional sterility. Since men had
hopelessly and forever departed from the
decency of simple animals, I wanted to enjoy
'the silken and tulle husks that remained. If
there was a sedative in cigars, an illusion in a
[140]
San Cristobal de la Habana
Daiquiri cocktail, I proposed to enjoy it at the
expense of a problematic month or year more
of life always open to the little accidents of
pneumonia or spoiled milk or motors.
What might be called the minor pleasures
of life, though in their bulk were vastly
more important than the great moments, Ha-
vana had carried to a high state of perfection ;
yet with, where I was concerned, an exception
not in favor of the theatre. I went, as I had
determined, to whatever offered, swept along
by the anticipation of Spanish dancing and
music : the first was immeasurably the best in
existence, and I liked the harsh measures of
Spanish melody, both the native songs of the
countryside and the sophisticated arrange-
ments by Valverde. A great many skilful
writers had described the dancing, and their
accounts were well enough, but, politely, they
all lacked the fundamental brutality of the
jota and malaguena, just as the foreign op-
eratic variations on Spanish themes were re-
San Cristobal de la Habana
minted in a smooth and debased universal
coin.
I purchased a ridiculously flimsy scrap of
paper, which, I was assured, made me the pos-
sessor of a grille principal at the Pairet
Theatre a box, as huge as it was bare, within
the stage. I could see, under the hood, the
long dramatic hand of the prompter waving to
the droning monotony of his voice through the
stupidest performance I remembered. It was,
by turn, a comedy, a farce, a pantomime, and a
comic opera, and a complete illustration of the
evils of departing from national tradition and
genius a dreary attempt at the fusion of
Vienna and New York, planned, obviously,
for a cosmopolitan public superior to the rude
familiar strains of gypsies.
At intervals a chorus of young women,
whose shrill excitement belied their patent
solidity, made an incongruous appearance and
declamation; they grouped themselves in
feeble designs, held for a moment of scattered
applause, and went off with a labored light-
ness that threatened even their ankles. This
[142]
San Cristobal de la Habana
was bad, but a revista I could think of noth-
ing else to call it at the Marti was, because it
was so much better, worse. There I had an
ordinary palco, enclosed by a railing from the
promenade and elevated above the body of an
audience composed of every possible shade
from fairest noon to unrelieved midnight
The evening was divided into two perform-
ances, for the second of which, Arco-Iris, a
largely increased price was demanded. This
was, again, Vienna and Broadway, but with,
in addition, an elaboration of color and light-
ing ultra-modern in intent
I had seen the same effort ten years before
in Paris, and the failure was as marked in
Spanish as in French. Mr. Ziegfield, assisted
by the glittering beauty of the girls he was
able to secure, had made such spectacles bril-
liantly and inimitably his own. The Latins
knew nothing, really, about legs : they showed
them with what was no more than a perfunc-
tory bravado, while it was a peculiarity of
shoulders the art of which they so daringly
comprehended that their effect was lost in
San Cristobal de la Habana
mass. The display, the extravagant settings
and costumes, of Arco-Iris, were, throughout,
mechanical; the coryphees were painfully
aware of their dazzlements; and an Andalu-
sian number, looked forward to with weary
eagerness, had been deprived of every rude
and vigorous suggestion of its origin.
When I returned to the Inglaterra I de-
manded of a clerk where I could find a
vulgar performance of, for instance, the haba-
nera, but he shook his head doubtfully. At
intervals, he admitted, Spanish dancers came
to the National Theatre; but his manner
brightened Caruso was expected in May. I
had no intention of staying in Havana through
May; and, had I been there, I'd have avoided
Caruso ... a singer murdered by the Vic-
trola. Already the seats for his concerts were
a subject for speculation, and it was clear that
they would reach a gigantic price, between
forty and sixty dollars for a single place in the
orchestra- In this depressing manner Havana
made it evident that it was a city both fash-
ionable and rich.
San Cristobal de la Habana
There had been a time, too, I was informed,
when all the uncensored moving pictures of
the world found a home in Cuba; pictures
where embraces were not limited to a meagre
number of feet, nor layettes, the entire ramifi-
cations of procreation, prohibited. But these
were gone from the general view. The films,
though, had not been destroyed, and for some
hundreds of dollars a private performance
might be arranged. But this I declined.
The moving picture industry had been brought
entirely from America, the theatres plastered
with Douglas Fairbanks' set grin, William
Farnum's pasty heroics, and Mary Pickford's
invaluable aspect of innocence. Never, in the
time I was in Cuba, did I see a Spanish actor
or film announced ; although a picture, appro-
priate to Lent, of the Passion, hinted at a dif-
ferent spirit.
I became, then, discouraged by the formal
entertainments. As usual, I was too late; the
process of improvement had everywhere
marched slightly ahead of me, substituting for
the genuine note a borrowed false emphasis.
San Cristobal de la Haband
To-morrow I should hear the Salvation Army
bawling in Obispo Street In a state of indif-
ference I went to Carmelo, a dancing pavilion
with an American cabaret, and drifted to the
table where the singing and dancing profes-
sion were having their inevitable sandwiches
and beer. A metallic young person with
brass hair, a tin voice, and a leaden mind, con-
versed with me in the special social accent of
her kind, ready in advance with a withering
retort for any licentious proposals. Beside
her sat a Mexican with an easy courtesy and
an enigmatic past He was, I gathered, the
son of an official ^ho, in one of the extermi-
nating changes of government, had escaped
over a wall in his pearl studs and dinner coat
but little else.
I liked everything about him but his indul-
gence for soda blondes ; yet in the serious con-
versation we at once opened connected with
a projected trip of mine to the City of Mexico
we forgot the girl until, exasperated by our
neglect, she lost some of her manner in an in-
ane exclamation made, she announced, for the
San Cristobal de la Habana
sake of Christ. Her companion immediately
returned to his engagement, and I watched the
Americans more or less proficient in that dance
the name of which had been borrowed from a
woman's undergarment. It had begun as a
chemise, but what it would end in was prob-
lematic.
Was it a healthy rebellion against the pru-
dery of repression or the adventitious excita-
tion of imminent impotence? Whatever had
brought it about, it was stupid, an insensate
jiggling of the body without frankness or
grace. I hadn't yet seen the Cuban rumba,
with its black grotesque negrito and sensual
mulata; but I was confident that if a rumba
were started at Carmelo, the shimmy would
resemble the spasmodic vibrations of a frigid
St. Vitus dance. The men and women doing
it, galvanized by drink and the distance from
their responsibilities, animated by the Cuban
air, were prodigiously abandoned. They
were, mostly, commercial gentlemen and stiff
brokers investigating sugar securities, or the
genial obese presidents and managers of steam-
[147]
San Cristobal de la Habana
ship companies. The presidents, the mana-
gers and brokers, were invariably accompanied
by their wives, who, for the most part, en-
deavored to re-create the illusions and fervors
of earlier days ; but heaven knew from where
came the women for whom the representatives
of Yankee merchandise were responsible.
Their origins were as mysterious as their
age strange feminine derelicts stranded by
temperament and mischance, caught in the
destructive web of the tropics. The dresses
they wore were either creations or makeshifts,
but their urbanity was as solidly enamelled as
their hair was waved or marcelled. There
was still another variety I had seen them be-
fore at expensive fishing camps tightly
skirted, permanently yellow-haired, with
stony faces and superfine diamonds. Drunk
or sober, their calmness was never changed by
so much as a flicker ; they caught sail fish in the
Gulf Stream, danced, ate, talked, and now,
certainly, were flying, with the same hard im-
perturbability and display, in gold mesh bags,
of their unlimited crisp money in high de-
San Cristobal de la Habana
nominations the granite women on the wall
of the Gallego Club.
My interest, however, in the American in
Havana had vanished, my position in life,
avoidance rather than protest, and I surren-
dered him to the hospitality of Cuba and the
gambling concessions. I wanted, from then
on, only the local scene: there were cities
where the foreigners, the travelers, made an
inseparable part of the whole, but this was not
true of Havana; it remained, in spite of the
alien clamor, singularly undisturbed, intact, in
essence. But a few streets, a plaza or two,
knew the sound of English, and beyond these
the voices, the stores, the preoccupations, were
without any recognition of other people or
needs. I began to wander farther from the
cafes of the Parque Central, the open famil-
iarity of the sea, and found myself in situa-
tions where, in my lack of Spanish, I was lim-
ited to the simplest, most plastic, desires.
It was in this manner that I found ear-rings
San Cristobal de la Habana
which I secured with a sense of treasure they
were in the shop of a woman who sold em-
broidered linen from Madeira and the Canary
Islands, lying haphazard in the lid of a paste-
board box. The patio opened directly from
the front room, the store, an informal assem-
blage of dull white folded cloths and frothy
underclothes, and outside a very large family
indeed was eating the noon breakfast while a
pinkly naked pointer dog lay on the cool tiles
with his feet extended stiffly upward.
I was paying for some towels, and regret-
ting in a singular composite of inappropriate
words and banal smiles the interruption of
the meal, when I saw the ear-rings; and im-
mediately, in the face of all the warning and
advice wasted on me, I exclaimed that I
wanted them. At this they were laid on the
counter, a reasonable price murmured, and
the transaction was over. I gathered that
they had been left for sale by some member
of an old Cuban house, perhaps by a Baeza y
Carvajal or Nunez: they were of pale hand-
carved and drawn gold, aged gold as yellow
San Cristobal de la Habana
as a lemon one pair of open circles an
inch in diameter, with seed pearls ; the other
the shape of small delicate leaves, with pearls
and topazes.
A store unmarked in exterior but surpris-
ing within attracted <me by some Chinese-
Spanish shawls, mantones, in a dusty show-
case; and I discovered a short, heavily-built
Spaniard stringing the hair of a wig against
a background of scintillating costumes for the
carnivals, balls, and masques. We were unable
to understand each other, his wife wrinkled
her forehead in desperation over my Spanish;
and then, gesticulating violently, she vanished
to reappear with a neighbor, a woman who
seemed to have suffered all the personal mis-
fortunes reserved for school teachers, who
made intelligible a small part of what we said.
They had, it developed, other shawls,
shawls worth my attention; one, in particular,
finer even than any of Maria Marco's. This
engaged me at once, for Maria Marco was the
prima donna of a Madrid company which
had sung in the United States two years before,
San Cristobal de la Habana
and which had given me, perhaps, as great
pleasure as anything I had seen on the stage.
But not so much for the singing it had been
the dancer, Doloretes, who captivated me, a
woman as brilliant as the orange-red shawl
draped before me over a chair, and suddenly,
tragically, dead in New York.
The wig-maker had had charge of the ward-
robe of The Land of Joy, and he assured me
again that not Maria Marco. . . . Abruptly
there was spread the sinuous fringed expanse
of a blazing green shawl heavily embroidered
in white flowers. I had never encountered a
clearer, more intense green or a whiter white ;
and, before I had recovered from the delight-
ful shock of that, a second shawl of zenith blue
was flung beside it. The body of the crepe-
de-chine, the weight of its embroidery, the
beautiful knotting of the short fringe long
fringe was an error and their sheer loveli-
ness, made them more desirable than jewels;
and, prepared to buy them at once at the price
of whatever fiction anyone wanted me to write
and would pay absurdly for, I was lifting
San Cristobal de la Habana
their heavy folds when a third mantone was
produced burning with all the gorgeous and
violent colors imaginable.
It was, I suppose, magenta a magenta of a
depth and wickedness impossible for any but
Eastern dye ; the magenta of a great blossom
of hell and it was embroidered with flowers
like peonies, four spans across, in a rose that
was vermilion, a vermilion that was scarlet;
and the calyxes were orange and gamboge,
emerald and peacock blue and yellow. There
were, too, golden roses, already heavy and
drooping with scent in the bud, small primi-
tive blossoms with red hearts, dark green
leaves, and dense maroon coronals starred in
white. The dripping fringe was tied in four
different designs. . . .
I asked its price at once, in order to dispose
of what couldn't help being painful in the ex-
treme, and he told me with an admirable ap-
pearance of ease and inconsequence. The
shop, that had been only half lighted by the
door, was now tumultuous with color, with
China and Andalusia; the shawl was the
San Cristobal de la Habana
Orient and Spain, brutal in its superbness and
as exasperating, as audible, as castanets.
However I might act, hesitate, visibly, I knew
that I'd buy it in an instant it had become as
imperative to me as a consuming vice. It be-
longed, rightfully, to the mistress of a Zuluoga
or of a Portuguese king, to someone for whom
money was not even an incident; I couldn't
afford it even if I wove it into a story with a
trace, a glimmer, of its splendor; but the next
day the shawl was in my room.
Oppressed by a sense of monetary insanity
not unfamiliar to me I was very apt to buy
an Airedale terrier or a consol table with the
sum carefully gathered for an absolute neces-
sity i S et about turning my new possession
into paragraphs and chapters; and it occurred
to me that it had a justified place in the Ha-
vana story I had already, mentally, begun.
The polite young men of the time, the decora-
tive youth of all times, were apt to have col-
lectively a passion for a fascinating or cele-
brated actress; and I saw that such a person
Doloretes would be important to my plan.
San Cristobal de la Habana
Yes, my young figure and his fellows would
go nightly to see her dance.
Afterward, crowded about a marble-topped
table and helados, they would discuss her
every point with fervent admiration. Yet she
would r be too vivid, too special, to take the
foreground I had wanted no paramount
women in the first place and I decided . . .
to kill her almost at once, to have her as a
memory. My boy, most certainly, would find
her shawl exactly as I had; and, bringing it
to his room, solemnly exhibit it to his circle.
More than that, I realized, it had given me a.
title, The Bright Shawl. I instantly deter-
mined to cast the story in the form of a mem-
ory told me by an old man of his youth ; and
that time, torn by unhappiness, indecision, and
hopeless aspirations, should be made, in re-
membrance, brilliant and desirable, wrapped
in the bright shawl which transformed the
lost past.
A remarkably good story, I thought enthu-
siastically; and I fell to speculating if George
Lorimer would print it. He would give it, I
San Cristobal de la Habana
told myself, a wide margin of chance; but,
in writing, uncomfortable necessities often
turned up in the course of narrative I could
leave them out, and damn myself, or keep
them and, maybe, damn the story in the sense
of its making possible my writing at all.' Not
that Mr. Lorimer personally had any regard
for emasculated chapters, but he was ad-
dressed primarily to another integrity than
mine; our purposes were not invariably coin-
cident. A fact which he, with his energetic
candor scoring pretentiousness, had made clear
in his generous recognition of where our paths
met
* * *
What was noticeable in The Bright Shawl
was that I hadn't gone out for material, but it
had come to me, scene by scene, emotion by
emotion. I had never been able deliberately
to set about collecting the facts for a proposed
story; I could never tell what impulse, need,
would be strong enough to overcome the la-
borious effort demanded for its realization in
words. For this reason I was free to see what
San Cristobal de la Habana
I chose without reference to any ulterior pur-
pose; and when, on a Sunday morning with
the heat tempered by a breeze lingering from
the night, I started for the cock-fighting at
the suburb of Jesus del Monte, I was com-
pletely at ease. I had decided in favor of the
cock-pit both because it was essentially Cuban
and because I had always detested chickens,
particularly roosters.
It was a thing of total indifference to me
what with steel spurs or without roosters
did to each other. Alive, they were a con-
stant galling caricature, a crude illuminative
projection, of men at their ridiculous worst.
Their feathered tails, their crowing, their
propensity to search for bits in the dung, their
sheer roosterness, together with the sly hypoc-
risy of hens, had always annoyed me individu-
ally. And, rather than not, I looked forward
to seeing them victimized by their own bellig-
erent conceit
I had to leave my cab for an informal way
behind some buildings and across grass, and,
as I approached a false stucco fagade, a deter-
San Cristobal de la Habana
mined ringing crowing filled the air. Be-
yond the arched entrance there was an area
of pavement with tables and a limited cafe
service; and, seated near, was a grave indi-
vidual with a shovel beard and a thoroughly
irritated rooster upside down in his lap. He
was cementing a natural spur over one that
had been injured, and drinking, now and
again, from a cup of coffee at his hand. Be-
yond was the pit, like, as much as anything,
a tall circular corn-crib, painted white, with
a cupola. There was place for about three
hundred, with box-like seats whose low hinged
doors opened directly on the sawdust of the
arena, more casual chairs, and as at the pe-
lota space for standing on the middle tiers.
There was a box above the entrance, and an-
other opposite, and this an enormous woman
in white embroidery and carpet slippers, and
I occupied.
A main had just been finished, and there
was a temporary lull in the noise inseparable,
in Cuba, from sport The sawdust was being
freshly sprinkled when a negro entered the
San Cristobal de la Habana
ring with an animated bag; and, noting the
elaborate polished brass scales that hung from
the center of the roof, I gathered that the
birds were to be weighed. The second was
produced, tightly bagged, by a highly respec-
table-appearing man of unimpeachable white-
ness and side whiskers, and the roosters were
left to dangle from the yard. It was to be a
battle al peso, by weight and equal spurs; the
first condition satisfied, the spurs were meas-
ured, by a graduated set of pewter tallies ; and
the uproar was released.
It was deafening a solid shouting of bets
offered in a voice of fury, together with ac-
ceptances, repudiations, personalities, and the
frenzied waving in air of handfuls of money.
The two men with the roosters advanced to-
ward each other and wooden lines laid in the
pit, prodding and otherwise increasing the
natural ill humor of their birds, and held the
shorn heads close for a vicious preliminary
peck. The roosters' legs, shaved to an inde--
cent crimson, were bare of hold, every super-
ficial feather had been clipped; and when
San Cristobal de la Habana
they hit the sawdust there was a clash as of
metal. The methods of their backers were
different the negro, in one of the local coat-
like shirts with a multiplicity of useless pock-
ets and plaits, squatted on his heels, impassive,
fateful, and African; but the man with the
orthodox side-whiskers became at once the vic-
tim of a hoarse whispering excitement. As
the other's bird reeled drunkenly about they
were badly matched and the main no affair
at all his pallid face flushed and he suggested
new atrocities to his champion.
This, it seemed to me, was totally unneces-
sary, for a wickeder rooster I was convinced
never lived. He was deliberate in his tactics,
unwilling to be robbed of his pleasure by a
chance coup de grace, and confined himself to
the beak. Soon his opponent leaned help-
lessly against the wall of the pit, while the
victor methodically pecked him to death
in small bloody pieces. The negro's face,
couched on a charcoal-black palm, was as im-
mobile as green bronze; but the white was
positively epileptic with triumph. And,
[160]
San Cristobal de la Habana
when the defeated bird sank in a spoiled dead
knot, he picked his up and, with expressions of
endearment, sucked clear its angry eyes. The
preliminaries were again gone through with,
and two large handsome roosters were con-
fronted by each other. As the surging clamor
beat about them I saw that one was undecided
in his opinion of what promised. He flapped
his wings doubtfully; and then, as the other
made a short rush forward, he turned and ran
as fast as his shorn legs could carry him.
This, considering the contracted round space
of his course, was very fast indeed ; the second,
pursuing him with the utmost energy, was
unable to get closer than a fleet dab at the
stripped tail. It was a flight not without a
desperate humor; but this, it was clear, was
appreciated by no one besides me.
The execrations, the screams, that followed
the retreating bird were beyond belief ; the en-
tire banked audience was swept by a passion
that left some individuals speechlessly lifting
impotent fists. Unaffected by this, the rooster,
slightly leaned toward the center of gravity,
[161]
San Cristobal de la Habana
went around and around the pit with an un-
flagging speed that should have commanded
an independent admiration for itself. Occa-
sionally the pursuer, in a feat of intelligence,
cut directly across the sawdust, and a collision
threatened . . . but it never quite arrived. I
lost interest in the hurled curses, the hats
twisted in excesses of rage, in everything but
the duration of the running rooster. It was re-
markable ; he had settled down to putting all
he had of strength and reserve into his single
purpose.
He had no will to fight, and, personally un-
derstanding and sympathizing with him com-
pletely, I hoped his wish would be respected :
while he had provided no main, he had faith-
fully substituted a most unlooked-for and
thrilling race ; making for all time and nations
and breeds of chickens a record for a thousand
times around a cock-pit. In some places he
would, perhaps, have been released, returned
to the eminence of a barn-yard; but not in
Cuba. When it had been thoroughly demon-
strated that he was uncatchable by his rival,
[162]
San Cristobal de la Habana
he was incontinently seized and both roosters
were carried, panting and bald-eyed, to a sub-
sidiary ring beyond, not half the size of the
principal pit, where running, or any discre-
tion, was an impossibility.
I saw him go with regret; he deserved a
greater consideration, and I hoped that, meta-
phorically in a corner, he would turn and be
victorious. A new individual, a small brown
man in soiled linen, had entered the box, and
he at once, in a slow, painful, but intelligible
English, opened a conversation with me. He
had, he said, a consuming admiration for
Americans, and as an earnest of his good will
he proposed to let me in on what, in the
North, was called a good thing. It was
no less than the cautious information that
in the next fight a dark chicken, a chicken
carrying a betting end as long as the Prado,
had been entered by President Menocal's
brother. I could, with a wave of the hand,
make a small fortune : for himself, he was un-
fortunate he possessed but eleven dollars and
odd pesetas.
San Cristobal de la Habana
I made some non-committal remark and
turned a shoulder on his friendliness for
Americans, conscious of a distinct annoyance
at having been mistaken for, well a tourist.
There was no inherent inferiority in that
transient state of being; but it was a charac-
teristic of the settlers of any given place set-
tlers of at least forty-eight hours that they
should regard with tolerant amusement the
new and the uninformed. He did, I thought,
my clothes, my cigar, my whole air of sophisti-
cated comprehension, an injustice; he should
have recognized that I was not an individual
to accept readily public confidential informa-
tion.
The birds were brought in and weighed, and
the person in the box with me and the billow-
ing white embroidery and carpet slippers ex-
citedly indicated a lean cream-colored rooster
with brown points. I fancied the other more,
and thought something of betting on him when
the main began the brown bird of the
brother of Menocal flashed forward, launched
himself into the air with a clash, and drove
San Cristobal de la Habana
both spurs through the head before him. It
had occupied something more than five but
less than ten seconds. Too bad, a deferential
voice murmured in my ear, that I hadn't taken
advantage of such an excellent opportunity
to get the better of all the too-wise ones.
With but eleven dollars and some silver he
had been cramped. . . . My interest in cock-
fighting faded before an annoyance that drove
me away from the Puente de Agua Dulce, cal-
culating how much, at the odds I missed, I
should have gained.
Money won at sheer gambling, at games of
chance which involved no personal skill or
effort, always seemed hardly short of miracu-
lous to me magical sums produced at the
waving of a hand. Their possession gave me
a disproportionate pleasure and glow of well
being; they seemed to be the mark of a special
favor; the visible gesture, the approbation, of
fortune and chance. I had had a lucky night
at the Kursaal in Geneva, playing baccarat,
and the changier, a silver chain about his neck,
had reconverted my bowl of chips into heaped
San Cristobal de la Habana
gold and treasury paper. But with that ex-
ception, and for some small amounts, I was un-
lucky. The occasion just past was an illus-
tration I was never really disastrously over-
taken, but equally I never reached sensational
heights.
There were, certainly, numerous places in
Havana for roulette, and always the American
Club for auction bridge and poker; but I
found my way to none of these: there were
men who could hear the soundless turn of a
wheel, soundless but for the fillip of the pith
ball on the wood and metal, through the streets
and walls of a city; and there were others who,
merely pausing in a hotel or club corridor,
would immediately form about them all the
adjuncts of poker the cards, the blue and
yellow and white chips, the bank president, the
shifty polite individual with pink silk sleeves
and a rippling shuffle, the rich youth. . . .
But, indebted, I suppose, to my spectacled
benevolent appearance, such occasions let me
pass unnotified.
I made, however, some effort to find a bil-
[166]
San Cristobal de la Habana
Hard academy, with the hope of seeing the pro-
fessional games and their audiences built up
on the four sides of the tables, common to the
Continent; but if there were any in Havana,
they, too, eluded me. I hoped to see bearded
champions embrace each other after chalking
their cues and then drive the ivory balls in red
and white angles across the deep green or
nurse them about the intersections of the balk
lines. It was very different in America,
where the billiard parlors were a part of hotel
life great rooms with the level green of the
tables fogged in smoke through which the
lights resembled the diminished moons of Sat-
urn; the audience, entirely masculine, seated
on the high chairs about the walls.
The types of women lingering outside, wait-
ing patiently on convenient benches, were far
different from the Latins. Occasionally a
youth would put up his cue, dust the chalk
from his fingers, assume his accurately fitted
coat, his soft brown hat, and go out to some
girl with whom he would plunge into a sub-
dued council marked by a note of expostula-
San Cristobal de la Habana
tion. Strange youth and unpredictable girl!
A term of endearment would escape, there'd
be a quick clinging of hands; and, from an
imitation gold purse, some money would be
transferred to an engulfing pocket.
But the men of Havana, it seemed, were
quite contented to talk, to sit in a cafe over
refrescos or in a parque with nothing at all
but cigars, and discuss eternally, with a pas-
sionate interest, the details of their politics and
city. Their contact with life at every point
was vivid and, in expression anyhow, force-
ful; they argued in a positive tone to which
compromise, agreement, appeared hopelessly
lost; and there was in the background the pos-
sibility of death by quarreling. That, in it-
self, gave their whole bearing a difference
from the conduct of a land where a drubbing
with fists was the worst evil to be ordinarily
expected. They looked with contempt on a
blow, the retaliation of stevedores, and we re-
garded with disgust a concealed weapon. But
where we might still, in simpler places, de-
fend what was locally called purity with pis-
[168]
San Cristobal de la Habana
tols, no one, today, took his politics seriously.
Politics, in the United States, was looked on
with cynical indifference, where it was not a
profession, but in Cuba it was invariably the
cause of fiery oratory and high tempers. This
had been true of America; even in my own
memory, in the Virginia Highlands, shotguns
had been out for a difference of principals;
but patriotism of that stamp had fallen away
before civilization, as it was optimistically
termed the end finally brought about by pro-
hibition. Discussion in general, that rose in
such volume on the Cuban night, had little
part farther north; my own friends, the men
specially, almost never said anything except
as a direct statement; we never met to talk.
They had a particular, a concrete, interest in
living, but no general. Further than that,
there was almost no individuality of opinion;
the subjects which made good conversation
were definitely and arbitrarily settled, closed.
To open them, to challenge public opinion,
was not to invite argument, but to send men
away to the greater safety, the solidity, of the
San Cristobal de la Habana
herd. A good story, the humor of the latrine,
was a better key to respectability than an hon-
est doubt. For those reasons I wanted to join
the arguments, the orations really, flooding the
circles of green-painted iron chairs on the Ha-
vana plazas; and, solitary, I passed envying
the ingenuous welding dissent
I imagined myself suddenly and completely
changed into a Cuban, slight and dark, in
white linen, with my hat, a stiff English straw,
carefully laid beside me on a ledge of the pav-
ing, smoking a cigar of rough shape but ex-
cellent tobacco. Not rich, certainly, but se-
curely placed in life! I was, in fancy, the
proprietor of a small yet thoroughly responsi-
ble oculist's establishment on Neptuno Street.
Since I was no longer young, and a member
of organized society, with a patron or two
from the Prado, I was conservative, but little
heated by patriotism ; and in favor, rather than
not, of annexation to the United States. My
private view was that Cuba hadn't been con-
spicuously worse off under Spain than liber-
ated. The politics of the present, when office-
San Cristobal de la Habana
seekers descended to the nanigos. . . . Here
was the substance of violent argument and re-
criminations ; the voices, the ideals, of young
men beat on me in a high indignant storm ; the
names of Cuban patriots, martyred students,
and Spanish butchers were shouted in my
ears. Sacred blood flowed again in retro-
spect, which should never be allowed to sink
infertile ; but when the words Free Cuba were
pronounced I waved my cigar with hopeless
derision.
How significant it was, I thought, that, in
imagination, I had pictured myself at fifty.
I saw the Havana oculist clearly; his name,
by all means, was Rogelio, Rogelio Mola, and
he had a heavy grey moustache across his lean
brown face which gave him an air of gravity
that largely masked the humor, the satire, in
his quick black eyes : Spanish eyes with no per-
ceptible trace of the soft iris of Africa. It
was past one o'clock when his tertulia scat-
tered, and I accompanied h^m toward his
home walking to get rid of the stiffness of
San Cristobal de la Habana
long sitting over Dragones Street, in the di-
rection of Vedado. Not yet, never now,
would he have a house in Vedado itself ; that
was reserved for the bankers, planters, and
Americans; but he was nicely situated in a
new white dwelling of the approved style,
overlooking a common that in turn com-
manded the sea.
The approved style was white plaster, a
story and a half high, with an impressive por-
tico a portico, attached to a small private res-
idence, that would have done honor to a capitol
building. There was but little ground, prin-
cipally extended in a lawn across the front,
and banked, against the house, with the spotted
leaves of croton plants, purple climbing
Fausto, and Mar-Pacifico flowers deeply crim-
son. He had, it was plain from his walk, a
touch of rheumatism, of sciatica really, and he
halted in the Plaza de Dragones to press his
thin hand to a leg and curse, by the Sacred
Lady of Caridad, the old age overtaking him.
That, it seemed to me, would not carry his
mind toward his dwelling, his wife grown in-
[172] *
San Cristobal de la Habana
ordinately fat, and their three daughters, all
long ago asleep ; no, it would send his thoughts
backward, over the way he had come not
from the Parque Central, but from youth.
He would brush his moustache reminiscently,
I was confident, at a train of gallant memories,
chiefly of New York, where, on the pier of a
fruit importing house, he had spent some tre-
mendous months. That experience had given
him an advantage, an authority, in everything
that touched the great republic, and lent his
politics an additional sagacity, his cynicism an
edge difficult to turn. He had intended to
stay in America, a journey to Havana was to
have been but a temporary affair; but there he
had attached himself to a wife, the daughter
of a grinder of lenses, . . . And here he was
at fifty, going back, after listening to a lot of
nonsense in the Parque, to his family in the
general direction, too, of the cemetery.
It was sad, and, for a moment, there was a
debate, a conflict, in his mind : though his age
was beyond denial, and his hip troubled him
but only after he spent an evening on the cold
[178]
San Cristobal de la Habana
iron chair of a plaza he showed no signs of
having passed the middle of his life. The
grey hair was distinguished; Madame Naza-
bal, who was a Frenchwoman, had assured
him of that The handsome girl in El Cor-
az<3n de Jesus, the Vedado bakery where Eng-
lish was spoken, flushed when their hands
accidentally met over the counter. But this
mood, his courage, was fictitious; it sank and
left him limping palpably, with an oppressed
heart He was, simply, an old fool, he told
himself, vindicating the humorous compre-
hension of his gaze.
If he wasn't careful, the young men of his
establishment, over whom he kept a strict par-
ent-like discipline, would laugh at him behind
his back. They were inclined to be wild as it
was, and he suspected them of going to the car-
nival balls, the danzons, in the opera house.
God knew that he had seen them in the com-
pany of no better than the girls from the cigar
factories. When he was younger young
that dangerous company had given a dance on
the last Thursday of every month, except when
[*74l
San Cristobal de la Habana
it fell in Lent, and he had held his place there
with the most agile among them, once even
pressing an argument with a man who was re-
puted to have been an espada of Castile. A
knife had grazed his throat and slit the left
shoulder of his coat through to the skin; the
mark remained, a livid welt under his collar,
but the assailant had vanished before he could
kill him. All memory of the girl had gone;
but she was beautiful, he was certain of that,
or else why should he have noticed her?
The girls of those days had a a quality, a
manner, lacking in the present. Their hearts
had been warmer, they were less mercenary.
Rogelio Mola detested mercenary women.
Now, as far as he could make out, nothing was
possible but rounds of the expensive cafes : the
fact was, the girls only wanted to be taken to
the Dos Hermanos, or the Little Club, where
the Americans could see them, and, perhaps
. . . Then, in about eighteen eighty, there was
some fidelity, some horior, some generosity.
There was romance that had disappeared
more utterly than anything else : he was more
[175]
San Cristobal de la Habana
than a little vague in meaning; his romance
was an indefinite state ; the glow, in reality, of
his own youth.
At that time, in such discussions as had
passed this evening, he had been on the side
of revolution, of expeditions to the Trocha, se-
cret associations ; but simply because his blood
was hot, his age appropriate to revolt. He
had been, without doubt, difficult; his elders
had predicted a cell in Cabanas as an ante-
room, a sort of immediate purgatory, to hell.
He raised expressive shoulders slightly at the
thought of the holy legends: a business for
women and priests. The Church, tempo-
rarily, had had some rare pasturage; but the
fathers were a shade too greedy; they had gob-
bled up so much that it was necessary to drive
them out. Women and priests, priests and
women! The latter had suffered no diminu-
tion of their privileges; they had too much for
which the young men, for all their self-opin-
ion, got nothing or next to nothing in return.
Rogelio Mola wondered if the old houses of
pleasure were unchanged.
San Cristobal de la Habana
He had not thought of them for years, and
he was contemptuous of men of his age who
did, still, consider them. Not that he was
puritanical and condemned all such institu-
tions, though he had a strong suspicion that
they had deteriorated. For the youth of his
day they had been very largely places of meet-
ing and conspiracy, where traditionally the
sentiment supported attacks on authority.
Yet a girl from Lima had betrayed Mario
Turafa, his friend, in hiding, to the Spanish
Government It was said that Mario had
been deported, perhaps to the very Peru
from which came his Delilah, but it was
more probable that he had been shot.
There had been one whom he, Rogelio, had
liked. . . . Her name came back to him, Ana,
and the fact that she sang quite beautifully
. . . nothing else. The words of a song
formed from the melody for a moment audi-
ble among his memories :
"Clavales, clavales
de mi Andalucia!
Mujeres, mujeres
de la Patria mial"
San Cristobal de la Habana
It was evident from this that she had come
from Andalusia. Thirty years ago! He
wished her the best of luck. Hadn't they
been young together, with at least the inno-
cence of true affection? His thoughts turned
guiltily to his wife, to his daughters white like
flowers of the Copa de Nieva. The twinge in
his leg resembled a hot wire; and resolutely
he marshalled his attention forward. How
dark, how depressing, certain reaches of Ha-
vana were, and he pictured the cemetery
ghostly, icy, in the nig'ht; women, with their
confessional, their faith in the forgiveness of
sins, were fortunate. Yet no one must say of
him that he was a coward, that, at the last, he
had been borne into oblivion on the oil of the
priests he had disregarded in life. Deep un-
der his skepticism, however, a low inextin-
guishable hereditary flame of hope burned,
independent of his intelligence.
My mind returned once more to Rogelio
Mola as I was standing outside an impassive
[178]
San Cristobal de la Habana
door, waiting for admittance, not far from the
Arsenal. It was the entrance to what he had
called a house of pleasure, and, long estab-
lished in Havana, unknown to America, one
that he might easily have frequented in the
reprehensible period of youth. I had ade-
quate abstract reasons for my presence, but
Rogelio, correctly insistent on a saving gener-
osity of emotion, had needed no ponderous ex-
planation. Indeed, I was there in his interest,
since, after all, I had imagined him ; I wanted
very much to have completely the material of
his setting, of the surrounding from which his
friend, betrayed by the Peru that had centuries
before despoiled Cuba, had been led out to
be, doubtless, shot. Not that, pressingly, I
felt the need for an excuse, or that I was es-
sentially making a descent The very bitter-
ness, the revilement in solemn terms, of my
early instructions, had, reacting, defeated it-
self.
What was before me, in a world where the
pure and the impure were inexplicably mixed
in one flesh, was inevitable; its ugliness lay
[179]
San Cristobal de la Habana
not with it, but in a society which, constantly
tearing it down, as constantly projected again
the penalty, the shadow, of a perfunctory and
material estate. In addition, as long as the
age of marriage, of love, was so tragically dif-
ferent in society and in nature, an informal in-
terlude was unavoidable. But I had no need
to apologize for anything. I had been spared
the dreary and impertinent duty of improving
the world ; the whole discharge of my respon-
sibility was contained in the imperative obli-
gation to see with relative truth, to put down
the colors and scents and emotions of existence.
What, pretentiously, was called the moral
must shift for itself; that depended on what,
beneath consciousness, I was the justice and
sympathy, the comprehension, of my being.
A slide opened mysteriously on the blank
darkness before me, a bolt was drawn ; and im-
mediately I had left the" street for a little en-
tresol filled with lamplight, the breath of
scented powder, and the notes of a piano
played by a girl whose cigarette burned furi-
ously on the scarred ebonized top of the in-
[180]
San Cristobal de la Habana
strument. She half turned, scanning me in-
differently, and went on with her unelaborate
music. The woman who had admitted me,
a figure whose instant scrutiny resembled the
unsparing accuracy of a photograph by flash-
light, after a polite greeting, ignored me abso-
lutely, and I was left to follow my fancy.
This led to the patio, larger and more en-
trancing than any I had before seen; it was
paved in blocks of marble, and the white walls,
warmly and fully illuminated, made a sharp
contrast with the night, the sky and stars,
above. There was a tree growing at one side ;
what it was I didn't know, but it hung large
intensely green leaves into the light before
climbing to obscurity. A great many people,
it seemed to me, were present; and, as I found
a seat on an ornamental iron, bench, the for-
mality of a civil greeting was scrupulously ob-
served. The company was, to every outer re-
gard, decorous to the point of stiffness. Op-
posite, two officers of the Spanish navy, in im-
maculate white with gilt epaulettes, were
drinking naranjadas and conversing with two
[181]
San Cristobal de la Habana
girls who nodded in appropriate sympathy.
Farther on, a Cuban exquisite, his hands, in
spite of the heat, cased in lavender grey gloves,
was staring fixedly at the shining toes of his
shoes. Others yes, Rogelio in his youth
their hair faultlessly glossy, were more ani-
mated; their gestures and voices rose irrepres-
sibly and sank in confidences to ears close be-
side them.
A row of doors, I then saw, filled one side of
the patio, the interiors closed by swinging
slatted screens ; the wall at my back was blank,
an exit at the rear, while on the right was the
entrance. Scattered about, with the benches
and chairs, small tables held a variety of
glasses and drinks . . * the entire atmosphere
was pervaded, characterized, by utter ease.
That was, to me, the most notable of the ef-
fects of that enclosure an amazing freedom
from superficial obligations, from the burden-
some conventions which, so largely a part of
existence, had come to be accepted either sub-
consciously or as a necessary evil. I realized
for the first time the inanity of imposed pre-
San Cristobal de la Habana
tences, the thick, the suffocating armor of triv-
iality that criminally and ludicrously muffled
life.
There were present, of course, all the poses
of humanity, and a great many of its conven-
tions ; the girls were not hippogriffs, but girls
timid, bold, religious, skeptical, feminine,
sentimental, happy and unhappy, hopeful and
hopeless. Yet, in contradiction to this, the air
offered a complete release from a thousand
small irritating pressures. It came, partly,
from the sense that here I was outside the or-
der, the legality, the explicit purpose, of the
forces organizing the world. I had stepped,
as it were, from time, immediacy, to timeless-
ness. The patio into which I was shut might
have been on that earth the ancients conceived
of as round and flat as a plate. No discov-
ery, no wisdom accumulated by centuries and
supreme sacrifices, had any bearing, any im-
portance, in my circumstances now. I was
contemporaneous with the lives precariously
spent between the ebb and flood of the ice
ages. The animals knew as much. But if I
San Cristobal de la Habana
had nothing to gain from all that was succes-
sively admirable, nothing was lost that had
been implicit in the beginning, nothing at the
last end would be changed.
The conversation fluctuated about me, the
glasses were carried away and brought back
refilled; the smoke of cigars and cigarettes
floated tranquilly up and was lost above the
illumination, and I completely dropped the
embarrassment which came from an uncer-
tainty in such minor customs as existed. I
was, in fact, extremely comfortable when I un-
derstood that I was left entirely to my own
desires. These included the offer, in clumsy
Spanish, of a general order of drinks; and
there was a revival of polite phrases. Not all,
by a half, accepted ; the others bowed, gravely
or cheerfully ; and I retired again to my spec-
ulations.
These were mainly gathered about the re-
gret that the scene before me was practically
forbidden to American novels. It had, in re-
ality, no place in the United States, and, there-
fore, could claim no legitimate page in Amer-
San Cristobal de la Habana
ican literature. There, anyhow, it could be
said for public morals, such things were nearly
all that the word vice implied. What, ex-
actly, I was lamenting, was the old fundamen-
tal lack of candor in the American attitude.
This, beyond question, proceeded from the
people themselves, and not from commissions ;
an enormous majority, except for that national
whispered currency of obscenity, was prudish
beyond reclamation. For them, it was prob-
able, the innocence of the body had been
branded eternally. And I was neither a
martyr nor a reformer. The loss to me was
considerable as it was, dealing with only the
outer garments of fact, I had been accused of
lasciviousness or something of the kind and I
envied the French the cool logic of their men-
tality, the cultivation of the French audience.
My mind reverted to Jurgen, the remark-
able narrative of James Cabell's, that had been
suppressed ; a summary act of disturbing irony.
For Mr. Cabell had spent a life, practically,
reaching from the imagination of childhood to
the performance of maturity, in a mental pre-
San Cristobal de la Habana
occupation with disembodied purity. He had
set up, in his heart and in his books, the high
altar of mediaeval Platonism an image of de-
sire never to be clasped, reached, from earth ;
a consolation, really, for the earth-bound. But
that, in the mind, the characteristic mind, of
America, had not had the weight, the value, of
a dandelion's gossamer seed. It was, defi-
nitely, a land that cared nothing for literature,
the casting of transient life into the perma-
nence of beautiful form. As the world ad-
vanced in years, the general importance of
literature, it seemed to me, diminished; the
truth was that people didn't care for it
The ladies of pleasure the merest identi-
fying phrase, since, in the first place, they were
practically all at the age of immaturity were
dressed in evening satins, cut generally with
an effective simplicity, or the lacy whiteness
still better adapted to the young person. In
the tropical patio with its canopy of broad
green leaves and night, the marble pavement
[186]
San Cristobal de la Habana
and alabaster walls, they were brilliantly ef-
fective ; it was only after an extended regard,
carefully casual, that I appreciated the amaz-
ing diversity of their individuality, the gamut
of bloods run. There were no Anglo-Saxons
they were faithful to the traditions of their
latitude and there was no positive Africa;
but there was Africa in faint dilutions, in at-
tenuations traced from lands remote as Tar-
tary:
There was, for example, a girl so blanched
that I saw she wasn't white at all ; her face,
even without its drenching of powder, was the
color of the rice-paper cigarette she smoked,
walking indolently by; and her hair was a
blazing mass of undyed red. Her features,
her nose, and the pinched blue corners of her
eyes, the crinkling tendency of her piled hair
its authenticity unmistakable in a strong
vivid sheen showed the secret that lay back
of her exotic appalling splendor. Her pro-
gress across the patio was a slender undulation,
and her gaze was fixed, her attention lost, in an
abstraction to which there was no key. No
San Cristobal de la Habana
imagination could have pictured such a strik-
ing figure nor placed her so exactly in the ulti-
mate setting:
Here she was artificial there were long jet
ear-rings against her neck and savage. In
her silk stocking, I had every reason to sus-
pect, there was a knife's thin steel leaf; but
who could predict the emotions, no instincts,
to which it was servant? Who, trivial with
the trivialities of to-day, could foretell, trifling
with her, what incentive might drive the steel
deep up under his arm? Hers would be a
dreadful face to see, in its flaming corona, in
the last agonizing wrench of consciousness.
Seated, and talking earnestly to a Cuban with
worried eyes, was a small round brown girl in
candy green, whose feet in childish kid slip-
pers and soft hands bore an expression of flaw-
less innocence. Clasped above an elbow was
an enamelled gold band, such as youth no
longer wore, with a hinge and fine gold chain
securing the lock. She touched it once,
absent-mindedly, and I wondered what was its
potency of association ; when, at a turn of her
[i 88]
San Cristobal de la Habana
wrist, she drained a glass of brandy, an act
of revealing incongruity. She was, I recog-
. nized from her speech, Spanish, from the
Peninsula ; and another, who told me that her
city was Bilbao, dispassionately, for a little,
occupied my bench. Bilbao, she explained,
was not beautiful ... a place of industry and
money. Nor was she charming, she was too
harsh; but her personality had an unmistak-
able national flavor, like that of Castell de
Remey wine. I was relieved when she rose
abruptly and disappeared into the entresol,
where the piano was still being intermittently
played.
The screen door to a room swung open, and
a large rosy creature, negligent and sleepy,
appeared momentarily, gazing with a yawn,
a flash of faultless teeth, over the assemblage.
She was without a dress, but her hair was in-
tricately up, and a froth of underclothes with
knots of canary yellow ribbons and yellow
clocked stockings made a surprising fore-
ground for the painfully realistic Crucifixion
hanging on the wall within. The cross was
San Cristobal de la Habana
ebony and the figure in a silver-like metal, the
Passion portrayed by a gaunt rigidity of suf-
fering. The screen closed on the tableau of
contrast, and the patio resumed its appearance
of a vaguely distorted formal occasion.
Whatever my feelings should have been,
there was no doubt that if for the extreme
pictorial quality alone my interest was highly
engaged. My interest and not my indigna-
tions! I was not, it must be admitted, com-
mendably outraged, or filled with the impulse
to rescue, to save, anyone, however young.
I seriously questioned my ability to offer sal-
vation, since I lacked the distinctly sustaining
conviction of superiority; I couldn't, offhand,
guarantee anything. Suppose, for argument,
I took one the youngest and haled her
away from her deplorable situation : what was
open to her, to us? Would she have pre-
ferred, stayed for an hour in, any of the tepid
conventional Magdalen homes, if there were
such establishments in Havana?
I had a vision of appearing with her
wrapped in a frivolous cloak, before the ex-
[190]
San Cristobal de la Habana
perienced wisdom of the Inglaterra manager,
in the corridor of American salesmen, among
the wives of the vice-presidents of steamship
companies, and explaining that I was deliver-
ing my companion from the wage of death. I
should have been, and very properly, put
under restraint and Dr. Laine hurriedly sum-
moned. In all probability, and with the ut-
most discretion, they'd have sent Pilar, or
Manuelita, back to the patio with the doors,
explaining to her that I was demented.
There were, undoubtedly, better places for
girls of fifteen, and they would have been the
first to choose them if a choice had been pos-
sible S ome would have been wives and some
opera singers and all, with wishing so free,
uncommonly beautiful. I had an idea that a
number of them would have gone no further
than the last, and, as well they might, left
the rest to chance. But their ideas of beauty
must have been stupid compared to what they
actually possessed.
There was a girl with a trace of Chinese in
the flattened oval of her countenance, and
San Cristobal de la Habana
heavy black hair, as severe as a metal casing,
redolent with fascination. She sat withdrawn
from the others with her hands clasped in the
lap of a fine white dress. She was delicate,
but not thin, though her neck was so slender
that the weight of her head seemed bent a
little forward. I had never before seen skin
so faintly and evenly golden; there wasn't a
flush, a differently shaded surface, anywhere
visible. A sultry air hung about her mouth,
the under lip brushed with carmine. Her
eyes, lowered and almost shut, were large, and
their lids were as smooth as ivory. But she
wasn't, otherwise, suggestive of that; she more
nearly resembled the magic glow of an apple
of Hesperides.
If I had encountered her twenty years ear-
lier, my experience would have been richer by
a glimpse of her involved image-like charm.
She was, conceivably, to the superficial West,
dull: it was evident that she almost never
talked the girls about were not her friends
but she had qualities, aspects, infinitely pref-
erable to a flow of words. I should have
[192]
San Cristobal de la Habana
asked of her hardly more than, at present, she
was, sitting quite a distance from me and fun-
damentally unaware of my existence. I de-
bated whether she would be more attractive
in the sleeve coat and jade pins of China or in
her virginal white muslin. . . . That now was
the circumference of my duty toward her to
put her in such colors, such surroundings, as
would infinitely multiply her mystery.
It was, I realized, time for me to leave I
wasn't Rogelio Mola in his youth and I paid
the inconsequential price of the drinks I had
ordered. There were adieux, as civil and im-
personal as my welcome, and the door to the
street was opened to let me, together with a
breath of the scented powder, out. The
arcade before me sounded for a moment with
the smooth falling of a latch, and then all trace
of the near presence of so much lightness was
obliterated. In memory it seemed slightly
unreal, a dangerous fantasy of murmurs and
subdued, knife-like passions the bleached
soul of Africa with massed red hair; a fri-
volity of yellow ribbons against a silver tor-
[193]
San Cristobal de la Habana
men ted Christ; the inertia of the East in a
heavy-eyed child; but, to balance this, I re-
membered the girl, like a harsh native wine,
from Balbao, an industrial city and very rich:
she restored to the scene its ordinary normal
reality.
# # #
The high empty austerity of my room en-
veloped me in a happy tranquillity; its effect
was exactly that of increasing age, substituting
for the violent contrasts of life an impersonal
spacious whiteness. I very placidly prepared
for the cool fresh linen of my bed, my mind
filled with fresh cool thoughts. More defi-
nitely than ever before I was accepting and
accommodating myself to the passage of time.
I was not only reconciled to having left forty
forever behind, but I welcomed a release from
the earlier struggles of resentment and desire.
The joys of youth, or anyhow in my case, had
been out of proportion to their penalties: I
had failed at school, at the academies of art,
and, more conspicuously still, as a citizen. I
was even incapable of supporting myself, a
San Cristobal de la Habana
task so easy that it was successfully performed
by three quarters of the fools on earth.
The failure as a painter was serious, but I
had never had the least interest in those quali-
ties included in the term a good citizen. I
knew nothing about the government of the
United States, and made no effort to find out;
as an abstraction it had reality for me, but as
a reality no substance. The priceless right of
vote I neglected for whoever it was in the
Republican machine that regularly discharged
that responsibility for me. All that interested
me, that I deeply cared for, was first the dis-
posal of paint on stretched canvas and then the
arrangement of words with a probable mean-
ing and possible beauty.
An extremely bad period, that, when I tried
to write without knowledge or support, reach-
ing from twenty until well after thirty, when
I managed to sell a scrap of prose. From then
until forty the time had gone in a flash, a
scratching of the pen : it seemed incredible that
the seven books on a shelf bearing my name
had been the result of so brief, so immaterial,
[195]
San Cristobal de la Habana
a time. Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba,
gazing peacefully into the dim expensive space
of a room in the Hotel Inglaterra, congratu-
lating myself on the loss, the positive lapse,
of what was called men's most valuable pos-
session.
No better place for the trying of my sin-
cerity than Havana existed; no other city in
the world could so perfectly create the illu-
sion of complete irresponsibility, of happiness
followed for its own sake, as an end, or as the
means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and
plazas and promenades, its alternating sparkle
and languor, like flags whipping in the wind or
drooping about their staffs, always conveyed
a spirit of holiday and of a whole absence of
splenetic censure. At the bottom of this the
climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days
and nights stirring with a breeze through the
galleries, concentrated the mind and body on
pleasure.
Night had always been the time for gaiety,
when the practical was veiled in shade; and
Havana responded with an inimitable grace
San Cristobal de la Habana
to the stars. It was constructed for night, like
a lunar park of marble and palms and open
flooding radiance; with, against that, streets
packed with darkness and doors of mystery to
which clung the faint breath of patchouli.
The air was instinct with seduction, faintly
touched by the pungency of Ron Bacardi and
limes, and bland with the vapors of delightful
cigars. The clothes, too the white linens
and flannels and silks of the men; the ruffled
dresses on the balconies, the flowery laces, like
white carnations, in the automobiles; the wide
hats of Paris and the satin slippers tied about
the ankles, with preposterous heels; the flut-
tering fans all, all were in the key of light
sharp emotion, of challenge and invitation and
surrender.
Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana,
any philosophy in the face of that charm, was
unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a
farther development of this, tacitly left to my
own devices and thoughts, as if there were a
general perception of my remoteness from the
affair in hand. I was suffered to ccme and go
San Cristobal de la Habana
without notice; no one, much, spoke to me;
even those not unaware of the possibility of a
book, of San Cristobal de la Habana, in which
their city would find praise, were hardly
stirred to interest The moment to go to Ha-
vana was youth, the moment for masked balls
and infidelity and champagne: its potency for
me lay in its investment of memories; I re-
garded it as a spectacle set in the tropics. I
was an onlooker and not a participant. But I
had, as I have shown, no regret; I had become
reconciled not only to the fleetness of time, but
equally to the fact that my role was necessarily
a spectator's. Hour after hour, year after
year, I sat writing at the low window which
looked out over my green terrace and clipped
hedge, to the road, to life, beyond.
Above everything, then, I was satisfied with
the Havana I knew. From the standpoint of
actuality my comprehension was limited I
was familiar with only a certain narrow part
of the city, for it was my habit to go back to
what I had found rather than discover the new
perhaps ten streets and a handful of houses,
San Cristobal de la Habana
parks, and cafes. Too much to get into a
score of books. What I had lost, I thought
further if, indeed, I had ever possessed it
was a warm personal contact such as I should
have had dancing with a lovely girl. I never
danced, but remained outside, philosophically,
gazing at the long bright whirling rectangles.
At the Inglaterra there were many men
older than myself who danced persistently and
had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too,
wore flowers in their coats, but aggressive and
not reminiscent blooms. They formed most
of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't
much youth among them, but I didn't envy
them in the slightest. They were, if possible,
more absurd than the women unmindful of
thickening waists and dulled eyes. Their
ardor was febrile and their power money; and
every time they escorted with a quickened step
their charmers past young dark men, the
charmers glanced back appealingly. It was
different with the Cubans, who regarded such
things more naturally, and did not, practically,
in consequence, get drunk.
San Cristobal de la Habana
The noise from San Rafael Street never
slackened, the clamor of the mule-drivers and
the emptying cans of refuse took the place of
the motor signals ; the slats of my lowered shut-
ters showed streaks of dawn. I turned once,
It appeared, and the room was filled with in-
direct sunlight, the hands of my watch were
at ten. It was eleven before I was dressed,
with the morning cup of black coffee empty
on a table ; at twelve I had breakfast, and until
five I idly read. The evening as. well was idle
a thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvi-
ous and active standards. I thought, with no
impulse to return, of the house near the
Arsenal, which had, in effect, been open for
centuries and which, unless life were purified,
would never close. The purity I meant was
not a limitation of passion, but its release from
obscene confines. It didn't matter what I
meant and, again, I was becoming too serious
... or not serious about the correct things.
There was perpetually the danger of being
overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early
flight, by the influences, the promptings, of
[200]
San Cristobal de la Habana
my heredity and strong first associations.
What an amazing climax to my records of
chiffon textures and moods of chiffon that
would be : shouting the creed of a bitter Scots
induration from the informal pulpits of the
streets! Or I might publish, to the dismay of
every one intimately concerned, a denuncia-
tory sermonizing book. But what the subject
was wouldn't matter, as it had not mattered
with Jeremy Taylor, if it were written with
sufficient beauty. Disagreeable books, too, in
spite of the accepted contrary belief, were
always very highly esteemed.
It was easy enough to account for Jeremy
Taylor by the vague generalization of beauty,
and I forced myself to a closer scrutiny of that
term and my meaning. The words beauty
and love, and a dozen others, like old shoes,
had grown so shapeless through long mis-
wear that they would stay on no foot. I tried
to isolate some quality indisputably recogniz-
able as beautiful and hit, to my surprise, on
[201]
San Cristobal de la Habana
intellectual courage. The thought of an un-
deviating mental integrity was as exhilarating
as the crash of massed marching bands.
Then, searching for another example, I re-
called August nights at Dower House, with the
moonlight lying like water between the black
shadows of the trees on the lawn. There was
a harsh interwoven shrilling of locusts and
the echo almost the feel rather than the sound
of thunder below the horizon. This, too,
stirred me profoundly, brought about the glow
transmutable into creative effort.
Another excursion found nothing but a boy
and a girl, any boy and any girl, fired by shy
uncomplicated passion. ... A mental, a
visual, and a natural incentive, each with the
same effect, the identical pinching of the heart
and thrust to a common hidden center. What
had they each alike? Perhaps it was this:
that they were the three great facts of exist-
ence, the primary earth, the act of creation,
and the crowning dignity, the superiority of
men who, somehow, had transvalued the sum
of their awarded clay. Somehow! I had no
[202]
San Cristobal de la Habana
intention of examining that. The fact was,
for me, enough.
There was, however, another phase of
beauty still, one peculiarly the property of
novelists, which had to do not with life at
all, but with death, with vain longing and
memories and failure. All the novels which
seemed to me of the first rank were con-
structed from these latter qualities ; and while
painting and music and lyrical poetry were
affirmative, the novel was negative, built,
where it was great, from great indignations.
Yet, while this was obvious truth, it failed
to include or satisfy me; for there were
many passages not recognizable as great
in the broadest sense, both in literature
and life, that filled me with supreme
pleasure there were pages of Turgenev spun
out of the fragile melancholy of a girl, a girl
with a soul in dusk, far more enthralling than,
for example, Thomas Hardy. It may have
been that there was the perception of a simili-
tude between Turgenev's figure and myself;
certainly I was closer to her mood, her disease
[203]
San Cristobal de la Habana
of modernity, than to a sheep herder; and
there was a possibility, for my own support,
that the finest-drawn sensibilities, not regarded
as emotions in the grand key 3 would turn out
to be our most highly justified preoccupation.
I was, at present, in Havana, submerged in
its fascination, and when I came to write about
it there would not be lacking those to say that
I had been better occupied with simpler
things. Hugh Walpole had warned me of
the danger, to me, of parquetry and vermilion
Chinese Chippendale; and I was certain that
he would speak to rne again in the s-ame tone
about idling in a mid-Victorian Pompeii, cele-
brating drink and marble touched by the gil-
der's brush of late afternoon. Perhaps Wal-
pole and Henry Mencken's keen friendly
discernment was right; but, damn it, my ex-
perience was deficient in material essentials; I
was dangerously ignorant of current reality,
and I doubted if my style was a suitable in-
strument for rugged facts.
What remained for me, an accomplishment
spacious enough for anyone, was the effort to
[204]
San Cristobal de la Habana
realize that sharp sense of beauty which came
from a firm delicate consciousness of certain
high pretensions, valors, maintained in the face
of imminent destruction. And in that cate-
gory none was sharper than the charm of a
woman, so soon to perish, in a vanity of array
as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly.
The thought of such a woman, the essence, the
distillation, of an art of life superimposed on
sheer economy, was more moving to me than
the most heroic maternity. I couldn't get it
into my head that loveliness, which had a trick
of staying in the mind at points of death when
all service was forgotten, was rightly con-
sidered to be of less importance than the sweat
of some kitchen drudge.
The setting of a woman in a dress by
Cheruit; a part of the bravery of fragile soft
paste Lowestoft china and square emeralds
that would feed a starving village, on fingers
that had done no more than wave a fan ; the fan
itself, on gold and ivory with tasselled silk
the things to which the longing of men, ele-
vated a degree above hard circumstances,
San Cristobal de la Habana
turned were of equal weight with the whole ;
for it was not what the woman had in common
with a rabbit that was important, but her dif-
ference. On one hand that difference was
moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had
been absorbed by the latter.
This, however wide apart it may seem, was
closely bound to my presence in Havana, to
my delight and purpose there. It was nothing
more than a statement, a development, if not
a final vindication, of my instant sense of
pleasure and familiarity a place already
alive in my imagination. My special diffi-
culty was the casting of it into a recogniz-
able, adequate medium. There, in the plait-
ing of cobwebs instead of hemp rope, I partic-
ularly invited disaster. It wasn't necessary
that I should sustain anyone, but only that
I should spread the illusion of the buried asso-
ciations and image of a brain. That, if it
were true, I held, would be beauty.
Here, at least, I was serious about the cor-
rect things, direct rather than conventional;
all that mattered was the spreading of the il-
[206]
San Cristobal de la Habana
lusion, the spectacle of what part of Havana I
did know interpreted, realized, not in the
spirit of an architectural plan, but as sentient
with reflected emotions. Otherwise the most
weighty charges against me were absolutely
justified. If I couldn't make Havana respond
in the key of my intrinsic feelings, if I had no
authentic feeling with which to invest it, my
book, almost all my books, were a weariness
and a mistake.
Novels of indignation or of melancholy,
of a longing for the continuity of individual
passion confronted with the inevitable it was
that, the perishability of all that was desirable,
which gave to small things, a flower in the
hair, their importance as symbols. The love
story, once the exclusive province of fiction,
had disappeared; it was now practically im-
possible for the slightest talent to fill a book
in that manner. The romantic figment, like
a confection of spun sugar with a sprig of arti-
ficial orange blossoms, had been discarded ; the
beauty of love, it had been discovered, wasn't
the possession of a particular heart, but the
[207]
San Cristobal de la Habana
tenderness, the pity, that came from the reali-
zation of its inescapable loss. No man could
love a woman, no woman could love a man,
who was to live forever; a thousand years
would be an insuperable burden. The higher
a cultivation, a delight, reached, the more
tragic was its breaking by death ; the greater
knowledge a mind held, the more humiliating
was the illimitable ignorance, the profound
night pressing in upon every feeble and tem-
porary human lamp.
Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write,
were composed, now, not so much from among
the brasses, the tympani, as from the violins.
The great majority, like the great books, were
dedicated to the primary chords; but my
reaching the former had been always hope-
less. I didn't mind this, for I told myself
that, while the structure of approbation I had
gathered was comparatively modest, its stones
and masonry were admirable; it was, if not a
mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on
earth what was in England called, I believe,
a freehold. It was mine, and there was no
[208]
San Cristobal de la Habana
lease dependent on the good will or on my
subserviency of any landlord.
Most of this went through my mind as I sat
looking at my trunk, open on end in an alcove
near the door, for I was gathering my clothes
and thoughts in preparation for leaving Ha-
vana. One thing only that I wished to see
now remained the danzon at the National
Theatre. I kept out a dark suit, one that
would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's
box; for I had been told that it was desirable
to avoid unnecessary attention. There was,
briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted
I had heard the same thing so often before
without subsequent justification but I could
believe it possible if there was any violent dis-
charge of primitive emotion. Here the spirit
of Africa burned remote and pale, but it was
still a tropical incomprehensible flame.
A strip of red carpet led from the outer
steps, across a large promenade, to the circular
wall of the theatre; aad though it was past
[209]
San Cristobal de la Habana
eleven, the ball hadn't yet assumed an appear-
ance of life. But just within the entrance a
negro band began suddenly to play, and in the
music alone I immediately found the potent
actuality of danger. I was without the knowl-
edge necessary to the disentangling of its ele-
ments: there were fiddles and horns and un-
natural kettle drums, and an instrument made
from a long gourd, with a parallel scoring for
the scrape of a stick. The music was first a
shock, then an exasperation hardly to be borne,
but finally it assumed a rhythm maddening
beyond measure.
It was Africa and something else notes
taken from the Moors, splitting quavers of
Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that
might have been the agonized voice of the first
Cubenos; with an unspeakable distortion, a
crazy adaptation, of scraps of to-day. There
was no pause, no beginning or end, in its
form ; it went on and on and on, rising and fall-
ing, fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and
then a blasting discord the savage naked ut-
[210]
San Cristobal de la Habana
terance of a naked savage lust; it was a music
not of passion, but of the frenzy of rape.
Nothing like it would have been possible in
writing, allowed in painting; only music was
free to express, to sound, such depths.
Nothing but music could have conveyed the
inarticulate cries of the stirred mire that
flooded the marble space of the opera house.
It had lost the simplicity of its appropriate
years, the spring orgies in the clearings of
early forests; time had made it hideously
menacing, cynical, and corrupt.
At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro
woman with a wheedling tainted manner tried
to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger
and pale, their faces coated with rice powder,
went past in dragging satins. They were
chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened
cheeks and dead-looking mat-like hair, their
coffee-colored breasts and white kid gloves,
gave them an extraordinary incongruity;
and behind them, as sharp as the whisper of
their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered.
[211]
San Cristobal de la Habana
Leaning forward on the rail of my enclosure,
I gazed down over the floored expanse of the
auditorium :
The stage was set with the backdrop and
wings of a conventional operatic design a
scene that would have served equally A'ida or
La Favorita: it towered, like a faded dream
of pseudo-classic Havana, into the theatrical
heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and
charcoal grey, of loggias and peristyles and
fountains; while in close order about its three
sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live
border of dancers. They were of every color
from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster,
to utter blackness. The men, for the most
part, were light, some purely Spanish, the
negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I
could see rfo indisputably white women.
There was a girl in a mantone of bright con-
trasting colors, a high comb and a rose in her
hair, about whom there was a question. How-
ever, her partner was one of the few full ne-
groes there; and, as they revolved below my
box, it seemed that her skin had a leaden cast
[212]
San Cristobal de la Habana
The danzon itself had, at first, the appear-
ance of a sustained gravity: it was danced
slowly, in very small space, following the
music with arbitrary reverses, and pausing.
There might have been, to the superficial
view, a restraint almost approaching dignity
had the dancers been other. The men, with-
out exception, wore their stiff straw hats and
smoked cigars through every evolution; and
the dresses, the dressing, of the women were
fantastic: a small wasted girl, dryly black, had
copied the color and petals of a sunflower. As
she revolved, 'her skirt flared out from legs
like bent bones, and a hat of raw yellow
flapped across her grotesque ebony coun-
tenance.
The danzon, for a moment, in spite of the
music played continuously and alternately by
two orchestras occupying a box on either side
of the stage, seemed formal. Then, abruptly,
a couple lost every restraint, and their mad-
dened spinning and furious hips tore the illu-
sion to shreds. And slowly I began to be con-
scious of a poisonous air, a fetid air as palpable
San Cristobal de la Habana
as the odors and scents the breath, the pre-
monition, of the danger of which I had been
warned. It lay in an ugly hysteria of rasped
emotions that at any illogical accident might
burst into the shrillness of a knife. It wasn't
dangerous so much as it was abjectly wicked
the deliberate calling up of sooty shapes that
had better be kept buried. It was unimpor-
tant that the men below me were, in the day-
time, commonplace clerks; the women could
be anything chance had made them : here, to
the spoiled magic of Carabalie nights, they
were evoking a ceremonial of horror.
Personally, since I had no hopes to save or
plans to protect, I hadn't the desire, like Samp-
son, to pull down the pillars of the roof on
their debased heads. I enjoyed it remarkably ;
the more because I saw, scattered among the
crowd, figures of unreal and detrimental
beauty a creamy magnificence in creamy
satin with a silver band on her forehead ; a yel-
low creature with oblique eyes in twenty white
flounces and a natural garland of purple
flowers ; a thing of ink, of basalt carved by an
San Cristobal de la Habana
opulent chisel, on whose body clothes were
incidental; and corrupt graces perfect in
youth and figure weaving the patterns, the wis-
dom, of Sodom.
One o'clock passed, then two and three, but
there was no abatement in the danzon. A
middle-aged man, with an abstracted air,
danced without stopping for an hour and fifty
minutes. His partner, flushing through her
dark skin, was expensively habited: her fin-
gers and throat glittered coldly with diamonds
and her hat was swept with long dipping
plumes. She had a malignant mouth and eyes
a thick muddy brown, and it was clear that she
hated the man in whose arms she was turning.
I wondered about her hatred and the patience,
the indifference, of the other: how revolting
she would be in a few hours, livid and ghastly
in the morning. He, probably, would then be
standing at a high desk, counting dollars with
integrity or adding columns of figures, precise
and respectable in an alpaca coat. An older
man still was dancing by himself, intent on the
intricate stepping of his own feet His agility
San Cristobal de la Habana
soon won an admiring circle, and his violence
increased with the applause: he jumped in the
air, clapping his heels together, and his arms
waved wildly a marionette pulled convuls-
ively by wires in strange merciless hands.
I imagined a fetish, a large god, on the
stage, drooping over his swollen belly, with a
hanging lip and hands set in his loins. His
legs were folded, lost in flesh ... a squatting
smeared trunk of hideous service. Around
him were the seated rows of worshippers, on
either hand was his jangling praise ; and before
him revolved the dancers in his rite. The
music throbbed in my brain like a madness
that would have dragged me down to the floor.
I speculated fleetly over such a surrender, the
drop, through countless ages, of that possible
descent.
# # #
It was, however, only just to add that the
idol of Guinea suffered unduly from his sur-
roundings and the age in which he was ex-
posed; in his place, his time, he had been
neither a monster nor unnatural, but nothing
San Cristobal de la Habana
more than the current form of worship. He,
Bongo, had had the misfortune to be cata-
pulted, together with his congregation,
through twenty, forty, centuries, in a breath,
on the magic carpet of greed, and put down
in a day where -he was not only obsolete, but
repudiated. Men saw him with the sense of
horror generated by a blasting view of their
own very much earlier selves. For the dif-
ference between the negro, the Carabalies, or
Macua, and the Spaniards of the sixteenth
century in Cuba was, at heart, historical in
time only. They were members we were all
members of one family. The innocence of
a bare black, torn like a creeper from the sup-
port of his native tree, tatooed with necessary
charms, medicines, against jungle fears and
fevers, had more to dread from Amador de
Lares than any later Christians owed to an
arbitrarily imported savagery. What, in re-
ality, occurred, was implied on the wide floor
of the opera house, was that the negroes, un-
able to change their simplicity as easily as
they superficially diluted their skins, kept their
San Cristobal de la Habana
innocent habits, their tastes in noise and re-
ligion and misconduct; but, in the dress of
civilization, these took on the aspect of a gro-
tesque defiled horror. With this, too, in an
earnest effort to assimilate as much as possible
of their enforced land, they caught such bright
fragments of life as struck them the glass
beads and bits of gay cloth and copied them
prodigiously. The confusion which followed
was a tragedy in the comic spirit a discor-
dant mingling that provoked laughter, quickly
stopped by a deeper understanding and by
pity. The past vital still: with the entrance
of the African slave into the West, it was ex-
actly as though a figure in the paint and
feathers of voodoo had been thrust into a
polite salon.
The spectacle had none of the comfortable
features of a mere exhibition ; for the revulsion
came from a spiritual shudder in the beings
of the onlookers; while the other injured in-
dividuals saw that, as clothes, the crude partial
imitation of a rooster was insufficient They,
the latter, commendably hurried into trousers
[218]
San Cristobal de la Habana
and pot hats, into satin trains and pink tulle
and white kid gloves; but the transition was
too hurried, too optimistic, and the resulting
incongruity ... I was not a student of eth-
nology, I had no theory of races, but, gazing
down from my box, it seemed to me that yester-
day could not be instantly combined with to-
day; it was evident that there was no short way
by a long and painful business of evolution.
Nothing more unfortunate could well be
imagined ; for, in the retributive manner I had
already mentioned, the Africa buried in the
West, so long forgotten, took life again, and
the danger to everyone had been acute
through a long period of Havana's years.
We, in temperate zones, in weathers that had
no need of the protection of a special dark pig-
ment, had been lucky; but we were trying our
luck very severely by subjecting it to the old
potencies not yet entirely lost. The danzon
was, actually, in a way beyond legislation, a
masked ball in black and white, where the un-
masking was involuntary and fateful.
One, I thought, spoiled the other, like an
[219]
San Cristobal de la Habana
incomplete experiment in chemistry where
nothing but an opaque liquid and an intoler-
able stench was evolved. Perhaps, with
acute necessity, a successful clear result would
reward the future with peace; but it wouldn't
happen in my knowledge; I hadn't a thing in
the world to do with it What occurred to
me then was the useful fact that the present
scene afforded the right, the only, ending for
my story, The Bright Shawl. It would
have to be tragic, but only indirectly; nothing,
I had decided, should happen to my principal
character beyond a young moment of supreme
romance. No, the mishap, death, must en-
velop his friend, the patriotic Cuban. He'd
be killed by a Spanish officer, through a
woman a woman in the bright shawl of the
dancer that had been preserved as a memento
of tender regard.
Some arrangement was necessary, perhaps a
prostitute. Well I had seen her, in virginal
white muslin, with the weight of her head, its
oval flattened by the hand of China, her heavy
hair, inclined on its slender neck: a figure, in
[220]
San Cristobal de la Habana
my pages, impassively fateful, remote as I had
seen her seated in a gay company. That
finished the story, for the youthful American,
after a vain public effort to secure for himself
the dignity of a heroic end, would be ignomin-
iously deported from Cuba. I had been often
asked how I arrived at my plots, but more
often accused of never reaching an intelligible
plan, and, until now, I'd been incapable of
giving an explanation satisfactory even to* my-
self ; b.ut here was one accounted for to a con-
siderable degree. It had begun by an instinc-
tive attachment to a city, to Havana; and the
emotions brought into being had crystallized
into a plan, for me, unusually concise.
There was a temptation, to be avoided, to
tell it in the first person; a version that had
come to be disliked almost as universally as a
set of letters. Some celebrated stories had
been written that way Youth but I felt that
it was an unnecessary charge on sympathy.
While the creation of character was no longer
the tyrant it had been, a certain air of veracity
was most desirable, and the limited scope of a
[221]
San Cristobal de la Habana
single intelligence discussing, explaining, him-
self was too marked. The great trouble with
the romantic novels up to the very present had
been that there was never a doubt of the ulti-
mate happiness of all who should be happy
and the overwhelming misery of those who
should be miserable. No peril was the father
of a thrill, because from its inception it was
plainly impotent to harm the lovely and the
brave. The pleasure had from witnessing a
dexterous job was lost in an artifice that seldom
approached an art But we'd improved that,
an improvement expressed in the utter loss of
the word hero; no man, or woman, was now
entirely safe in the hands of his romantic au-
thor; the two manners had come creditably
together.
I had become, subconsciously, interested in
a girl pausing on the floor, and, in response to
my scrutiny, she glanced up with a shadowy
smile. I gazed with instant celerity and fix-
edness at the ceiling, then at the upper boxes
opposite, since below, indiscretion was laid like
a trail of powder, of explosive rice powder.
[222]
San Cristobal de la Habana
There was no cutting in at that ball. She was
more than charming, too, with her mixed
blood evident in her carriage, her indolence,
rather than in feature. She wore blue, a
wisely simple dress that showed small feet,
like butterflies in their lightness, and the in-
stinctive note of a narrow black velvet band on
her throat.
An air of -sadness rested on her, on, princi-
pally, a superiority anyone could see. Her
fan opened and shut in a thin pointed hand.
A maid, I told myself, reflecting the aristoc-
racy of the closets of delicate clothes in her
charge, scented from the gold-stoppered bot-
tles of her mistress. S'he was another phase
of what had been going on at such length
through my mind a different catastrophe,
since she was denied the reward of the virtues
in either of the races that had made her. In
Boston she would have become a bluestock-
ing, a poet singing in minor cadence to tradi-
tional abolitionists become dilettantes, but in
Cuba, tormented by the strains of the dan-
zon:
[223]
San Cristobal de la Habana
There, her flax burning in resentment and
despair, she might be extinguished in the tide
restlessly sweeping to the troubled coast of
Birrajos: or, at Havana, carried into the se-
crets of the Nanigos : in the black cabildo of
that society, provision was made for a woman.
It was significant that the first organization
of nafiiguismo in Cuba was purely African,
for the hatred of its members, Carabalies, for
the white race made the admission of even
mulattos impossible. This society tierra or
juego was formed during the administration
of General Tacon, in the village of Regla, and
called Apapa Efi. It was, against the pro-
tests of its originators at sharing the secret
with too many, enlarged, and spread through
the outskirts of Havana. There the mulattos
greatly outnumbered the blacks, and they
formed a society of their own, its oath sworn
in Ancha del Norte Street, named Ecobio Efo
Macarara. They, insisted on a common
brotherhood and their right of entering the
[224]
San Cristobal de la Habana
fambas, the ceremonial rooms; but there was
a determined opposition, open battle and mur-
der in Perserverancia and Lagunas Streets.
After this there was a general meeting at Ma-
rian-ao, the early bar to color, as distinguished
from black, removed, and the infusion of the
dark ritual of Efi into white blood began.
When, ten years after, an indiscriminate so-
ciety, the Ecobio Efo, was terminated by the
authorities, Spanish nobles and professional
men were assisting in the rites.
What bad started upon the African river
Oldan as a tribal religion took on, in Havana,
a debased version of Rome, and the veneration
of Santa Barbara was added to the supreme
worship of Ecue, a figure vaguely parallel to
the Holy Ghost, created in the sounding of a
sacred drum. And what, equally, in the Car-
abalie Bricamo was Dibo, God, became in
Cuba an organization of criminals and finally,
when its more obvious aspects were stamped
out, a corrupt political influence. There, in
the clearest possible manner, was traced the
eventu-al effect of so much heralded superior-
[225]
San Cristobal de la Habana
ity, such enormous advantages, on native be-
lief.
There could be no doubt, though, of the
fact that, in any pretence of civilization, the
nanigos were detrimental ; it was unavoidable
that they should have degenerated into a sav-
age menace, not only in overt acts, which were
not lacking, but in practices of mental and
emotional horror. Their ceremony, with its
strange vocables and distortions of meaning;
the obscene words that were but symbols for
obscenities beyond imagination; the character
of their dance, which gave them the name ar-
rastrados, men who dragged themselves, rep-
tilian, on the ground all combined in a poison
like a gas sweeping from the morass of the
past It held, beneath its refuge and defiance
of society, the appeal of a portentous secret,
bound in blood, the fascination, the fetishism,
of orgiastic rituals, and, under that, stronger
still, delirious barbarity.
Its legend was not different from the others
which formed the primitive bases of subse-
quent elaborate beliefs: the miracle, with an
[226]
San Cristobal de la Habana
attending baptism, was consummated by a
woman, Sicanecua, who found a crying fish
the fish was a sacred Christian sign in her
jar of water. In recognition of this she was
sacrificed and her blood put to a holy use, and
the fish skinned for the drum, sounded by the
fingers, used in his praise. Here Ecue, the di-
vine, was baptized by Efo in the Oldan, who
in turn signed his disciple. And about that
tradition, guarded with its instrument in
the altar, Ecue sese, the degenerate elements
and characters of modern naniguismo gath-
ered. There were, necessarily, changes in the
Cuban form of worship the skin of a goat
was substituted for the unprocurable variety
of fish, and the timbre of the original drum
secured by an artifice. The need, as well, of
finding another anointment than human blood,
difficult to procure in Havana, led to the sacri-
fice of the rooster or a goat. This, now, had
a crucifix, with the profession that God, Dibo,
must be over everything, and a sacramental
singing; but not the Te Deum or Laudes . . .
Efore sisi llamba, and the reply Ho Isueribo
[227]
San Cristobal de la Habana
engomo . . . Mocongo! while the Empego,
the clerk of the service, shifted brightly col-
ored curtains and enveloping handkerchiefs
and marked with yellow chalk the head and
body and palms of the initiates.
A diablito had in charge the offices of the
catechism Come with me; where did you
leave your feet; where I left my head ! Enter
where Bongo is and cry with your brother!
Look at your brother because they want to
choke him. He conducted the sacrifice of the
goat, which, in a memorial of Guinea, was
eaten with pointed sticks, with the drink Mu-
cuba, made from sugar-cane rum and bitter
broom. A strange procession followed, led
by the Insue, with a woman in a shift, Sicane-
cue, and the diablito skipping backward. The
sese, a silver crucifix with four black feathers,
was carried, and later the remains of the feast
were thrown into a cemetery.
The effort to end naniguismo in Havana be-
gan in eighteen hundred and seventy-five,
when its gatherings were forbidden; but,
deeply traditional, it flourished in hidden
[228]
San Cristobal de la Habana
places, in the jail where nanigos were con-
fined and the cellars of Jesus Maria. Long
before that the poet Placido had been killed ;
within a few years the Llamba named Hand
on the Ground was judicially executed; and
following the assassinations during the carni-
val of eighteen hundred and sixty-five, sweep-
ing deportations were enforced. In Maloja
Street a juego, Acaniran Efo Primero, with
officers drawn from reputable quarters, was
surprised ; the next year the Abacua Efo was
exterminated; a public clash of diablitos re-
sulted in apprehensions; and twenty-five nan-
igos were taken on Vista Hermosa Street.
It was, in reality, Africa in Havana,
brought against its wish and to its tragic mis-
fortune; and, planted in an alien soil, but
among a common genus, the mysteries of re-
ligion, it grew into an aberration of all that
gave it birth. Aside from this, its significance,
for me, lay in its amazing language, an idiom,
specifically, composed of the Carabalie Bric-
amo and a Spanish without articles or con-
junctions, equally incapable of exact images
[229]
San Cristobal de la Habana
and the expression of abstract thought. But
taking the place of its omissions, was a con-
gealing power of suggestion, "of creating,
through, apparently, no more than the jumb-
ling of common terms and sounds, sensations
of abject dread. The four bishops of the rit-
ual, in their order, were In-sue, Illamba, Mo-
congo, Empego. In naniguismo man was
momban, an idiot was sansguere, a knife icua
rebesine, a pistol etombre, immortality em-
bigiii, the night erufie, war ochangana, the
sun fanson, and worms cocorico. The lan-
guage took short rigid forms, phrases ; it had
little if any plasticity: Amandido amanllu-
rube, The day goes and the night comes. Efi-
quefi que buton efique Ename onton Ellego
Efimeremo Iboito, Eurico sangacurici eurico
sanga quimagua sanga nampe, nampe sanga
mariba, The owl drinks the blood of the dead
and flies to the sea.
The terms of the acts of worship were par-
ticularly heavy, sultry, and held in their
sound alone the oppressive significance of fet-
ishes as black as the night from which they
[230]
San Cristobal de la Habana
were shaped. The minister of death to Sin-
anecua, a ceremony which became traditional,
was named Cuanon-Araferrobre, and the act
of sacrifice the Acua Meropo'. The singers
before the altar, making visible the sacred
stick, Baston Mocongo, intoned Mocongo Ma-
chevere, Mosongo moto cumbaba eribo, and
Erendio basi Borne, I believe in God and God
is great; with, at the last, silencing the profes-
sion of faith, the voice of the drum, tarini-
bongo.
The nanigos had been driven from the
streets through which, at first, on 'King's Day,
Dia Reyes, they were permitted, once a year,
to parade with native costumes and instru-
ments atables and marugas and ecous, a flat-
tened bell struck by a thin stick. Their f am-
bas were destroyed and hysteria cooled ; but I
wondered about both the secretiveness and
the persistence of the primitive spirit and the
delicate melancholy that veiled the girl so
faintly tinged with carabalie, resting below
my box through the rasping strains of the dan-
zon. Had her gain been greater than the loss,
San Cristobal de la Habana
the ruin, of her simplicity; had she, dragged
abruptly from saurian shadows, been made
white by an arbitrary papal sun?
A glimmering dawn, faintly salt with the
presence of the sea, was evident in the Parque
Central when I walked the short distance, not
more than a few steps, from the opera house
to the Inglaterra, my head filled with the res-
onant bos and bongos of naniguismo. Ha-
vana, for a moment, seemed like a cemetery
its own marble cemetery of Colon where a
black spirit, buried in a secret grave, walked
and would not be still. I speculated about
that same spirit in another connection in its
influence on painting and music, on Western
literature. It had affected dancing pro-
foundly, making it, in the United States, al-
most wholly its own; and the Spanish, with
whom, in the richness of a tradition and per-
fect expression, no others could compete,
owed a great debt to Africa. Our music, too,
it had influenced to such a degree that it was
[232]
San Cristobal de la Habana
doubtful if we had any outside the beat of
negro strains.
Stephen Foster, a great composer in that he
had enclosed the whole sentiment of an age
within his medium, was often but a paraphrase
of a darker melody. Foster, like Havana,
was Victorian, a period that dreamed of mar-
ble halls, set in a pitch impossible now, and
yet, curiously, charged for an unsympathetic
world with significant beauty. This negro
contribution was in a melancholy and minor
key, the invariable tone of all primitive song;
in poetry, as well, a lyrical poetry nearly ap-
proaching music, there was an analogous col-
oring between the race and its shadowed meas-
ures.
The reminiscent emotions that, with us,
were mainly personal, in the negro were
tribal; he had not been individualized,
brought to a separate consciousness; and, in
consequence, his song, practically lacking in
intellect, dealt only with instinctive feelings.
Growing shrill with passion and sinking to
the monotonous laments of formless sorrow, it
San Cristobal de la Habana
belonged equally to all the men, the women,
who heard it it was their voice and compre-
hensible triumph or pain; without artifice it
wasn't artificial nor ever insincere; and, as a
means of gold, a medium for lies, it had no
existence. The voice of all, an instrument of
natural beauty, shared by villages, its pure
quality, brought in slave ships that rotted with
their dead on the sea, gave the shallow and
vitiated West a fresh earthen tonic chord.
The negro, naturally, hadn't grown more
cheerful in his new imposed setting; and it
was possible that his music had gained an
added depth, at any rate for our perception,
from the weight of banishment and shackles.
He had not turned with any success to crea-
tive accomplishment that needed mental in*
dependence and courage, or to forms, like the
novel, wholly modern. On the other side, the
novel, with all its trumpeted young freedom,
had never, with even relative truth, expressed
the negro in the Americas. This, a subject of
appalling splendor, had, in the United States,
been turned over to the comic spirit and short
[234]
San Cristobal de la Habana
impressions stories, superficially, falsely, pa-
thetic. The fact was that we had enormously
harmed the negro, and for that reason, in the
familiar process of human self-esteem, na-
tionally we were uneasy, resentful in his pres-
ence. We saw him, when we escaped from
absolute hatred, as a figure, a subject, without
dignity: we lacked there the penetrative sym-
pathy which was the soul of imaginative fic-
tion. Such a novel, I thought, was perhaps
of everything that offered the best worth writ-
ing.
Certainly nothing more difficult could be
well attempted; my knowledge, in Havana
and through the nanigos, had been perceptibly
enlarged, and I was not unfamiliar with the
state in which, I decided, the story must be laid
not in Virginia, but upon a level grey reach
of Louisiana, cut by tideless bayous and satu-
rated with the fever of cane and cypress
brakes. A bitter novel like the broom herb
put in the ceremonial drink Mucuba, pages
from which it would 'be hard to exclude a fury
of hopelessness! And what an angry dis-
San Cristobal de la Habana
turbed wasplike hum it would provoke! No
magazine, of course, would touch it it would
be sold, for a week or ten days, from under
counters, and then we, my novel and myself,
metaphorically burned. A magnificent pro-
ject:
A huddle of cabins at the edge of a wall of
black pines beyond a deep ruined field but
perhaps this was South Carolina infinitesi-
mal ragged patches of corn, a sandy trail lost
abruptly in the close forest, and half-naked
portentous shapes. There would be a town
back in the country with a desolate red square
of great sprawling water-oaks smothered in
hanging moss, a place at once old and raw,
and ugly with vindictive ignorance. . . . The
negroes were infinitely happier in Havana,
where the heat, the palms, were their own ; and
I was surprised that they didn't desert the
United States in a body for a suaver spirit in
the air and man. Cuba, to a large measure,
with what final result I wasn't concerned, had
absorbed them in the manner that Spain had
absorbed the Moors. Havana made some de-
[236]
San Cristobal de la Habana
nial of this, and prided itself, with entire jus-
tice where it was true, on unmixed Castilian
blood; but the other was perceptible in the
gait, the very whiteness, of Cuba's principal
city the whitest walls on earth. This didn't
bother me; I liked Havana from its farthest
view to its most intimate fagade, and I was
grateful to whatever had made it
In my room the negro, with the danzon,
faded from my mind; and I only paused to
speculate dimly about his overwhelming pref-
erence, where a choice existed, for the Protes-
tant religions instead of Roman Catholicism.
I should have thought that the color, the
imagery and incense, of the Catholic Church
would be irresistible. Yet there were, in the
United States, thousands of colored Metho-
dists and Baptists for one adherent of Rome.
It might be that the hymns of Methodism, suf-
ficiently melancholy and barbarous in figure,
God knew, were the reason the character of
the hymns and congregational singing, the
loud pictorial shouts. The later religion of
the negroes, in addition to what I had already
[237]
San Cristobal de la Habana
considered, was a subject to be avoided; but
running through my mind was the memory
that in Richmond, not long ago, it was com-
mon in the evenings of spring for bands of
negroes to go through the streets singing spir-
ituals and constantly gathering others who
dropped their work, their responsibilities, to
join the passing chorus of hope.
That was lost now, I understood, a vanished
custom, killed by self-consciousness; but it
would have been a fine thing to hear ap-
proaching and receding through the dusk, a
stirring resinous volume or a mere vibrant
echo, a dying whisper. Perhaps that, a dying
whisper, would be the solving of the whole
tragic difficulty disease and winter and re-
lentless natural laws. The latter moved with
great deliberation through unlimited centu-
ries, but the impatience of men demanded in-
stant release from trouble. They wanted
black black and white white, with no transi-
tion, no blurring of the edges ; this was their
dream, but they constantly defeated it, be-
trayed their ideal. Yes, it might be that
[238]
San Cristobal de la Habana
the humility of that defeat, in the far
future, would accomplish a universally
white city. Only one other way offered:
a different humanity from any which
had yet appeared outside rare individuals
. . . but that vision seemed, to me, as fantas-
tic as the sentence in Carabalie Bricamo that
gave it expression, Eruco en llenison comun-
bairan abasi otete alleri pongo We of this
world -are all together. The truth was, hon-
estly at heart, that I couldn't commit myself
to all, or even a quarter, of what this would
have demanded. Impersonally I was able to
see that, as an idea, it was superb, I realized
that something of it must inform my pages;
but it was useless to pretend that I could be-
gin to carry it out or that I was, in practice,
a Christian. I was tired, and my thoughts
grew confused, but dimly in my mind was
again the consciousness of the remote fate of
the creative writer, an individual without even
the desire to be a part of that for which he
cried. .
* # #
[239]
San Cristobal de la Habana
Certainly I had no marked love of humanity
the following morning, caught with a small
mob in a narrow passage of the wharf where
I was waiting to board the steamer for Key
West. I was between the water and a wooden
partition, the heat was savage, and a number
of youthful marines, returning home from
Camagiiey, were indulging in a characteristic
humor the dealing of unsuspected blows,
of jarring force, among themselves. They
shoved each other, in a crowd shoulder to
shoulder, disregarding entirely the indirect
results of their vigor, and exchanged threats
of fulminating violence. They were not more
annoying than the others, but only more evi-
dent; and, as the advertised time of departure
was past by an hour, and then a second hour,
and the sun found its way into our walled
space, even the marines subsided. Every trace
of dignity, in that heat, ran away from the
people about me. While, on the whole, they
were uncomplaining, even relatively consider-
ate of others' discomforts, wondering, with
weary smiles, when the boat would be off, I
[240]
San Cristobal de la Habana
had no such kindly promptings. ... I hated
them all, the ugliness of the women and the
men's dull or merely sharp faces, with an in-
tensity that wasn't normal. When I was very
young in'deed, scarcely past two, I had been
nearly crushed in a throng after the Sesqui-
centennial parade in Philadelphia; long aft-
erward I had been, to all practical pur-
poses, asphyxiated in a train that broke down
in an Apennine tunnel; as a result, I had an
unreasoning fear of crowded bodies or limited
space; and this dread, before long, on the Ha-
vana wharf, turned into an acute aversion for
every individual and thing about me.
The surrounding insistent good nature de-
veloped in flashes of exchanged homely wit,
varied by the attitudes of restraint, and, of
them both, I couldn't tell which I resented
more. The present position of the waiting
people, the long exposure to the intolerable
sun, was the result of their patience; of that
and their personal inefficiency reflected in
their official management. All the bad gov-
ernments in the world, the dishonesty and uni-
San Cristobal de la Habana
versal muddles, were nothing more than mon-
uments to the immeasurable stupidity and
greed of the people ; they were betrayed polit-
ically not by powerful and unscrupulous par-
ties and men, but by themselves ; perpetually
and always by their own laziness and supersti-
tion and jealousy.
The Cubenos, the original inhabitants of
Cuba, were parcelled in the bondage of enco-
miendas, exterminated by the passion of the
Spanish Crown for gold; when they had
been sacrificed, Africa was raked by sla-
vers for labor in the mines and planting;
beneath every movement, instigated by hope
or supported by returns, riches were the incen-
tive and power. Men had never, within his-
tory and their secret hearts, cared for anything
else: an ineradicable desire. There was a
facile public gabble about the qualities of the
spirit, about soul; but the solid fact of
money, both as an abstraction and what con-
spicuously it brought, was what the people
worshipped, wanted, what they schemed or
[242]
San Cristobal de la Habana
stole for, or in the service of which they per-
formed the most heroic toil.
This was not, necessarily, an ignoble or neg-
ligible pursuit, but it was corrupted by an at-
tending hypocrisy which forced a fervent de-
nial, the pretense of an utterly different pur-
pose, to be worn like a cloak. It was possible
that, admitted, the sovereignty of gold would
be the most beneficial rule applicable to man.
It was preeminently the symbol, the signature,
of power; with the late sugar crops it had rev-
olutionized Cuba. Havana was for the mo-
ment, in a very strong sense, the capital of the
world, and the visible mark of that was the
stream of automobiles on the Prado and Male-
con; individually, money was counted by the
million the recognition, the desired reward,
of the fact that Cuba controlled a necessity of
life. The instinct to profit by such turns of
fortune was deeper than any charitable im-
pulse; there was a tendency to speculate in
wheat more general than the impulse to give
loaves to the starving.
[243]
San Cristobal de la Habana
There was a sudden surge toward the gang
plank of the City of Miami, and I was borne
onto the steamer, away from Havana, in an
exasperated and bitter spirit. I had entered
the harbor happily, saturated by its beauty,
but I was leaving blind to the marble walls
on the blue water. However, it was cooler
on an upper deck; and with my back uncom-
promisingly turned on humanity, on my fel-
low passengers over a sea like a tranquil il-
lusion of respite between stubborn realities, I
picked out from the panorama of the city
across the harbor, diminishing in its narrow
entrance, familiar buildings and marks. Ha-
vana vanished, I thought, far more rapidly
than it had come into view; soon nothing of
Cuba could be seen but the dark green hills
and thinly printed silhouettes of mountains.
I had it, though, in my memory; Havana was
now woven into the fibre of my being.
The Inglaterra Hotel took its place with
all the remembered spots where I had lived:
the bare pine-sealed room in the Virginia
mountains, the tall narrow house in Geneva,
[244]
San Cristobal de la Habana
the courtyard in the Via San Gallo, the brick
house in a suburb from which, in a rebellion
against every circumstance of my life, I had
escaped. I recalled days on end when I had
tried to write without the ability to form a
single acceptable sentence, when the floor was
heaped and littered with pages crushed and
flung away. Then, it had seemed, I should
get nowhere, and see, do, nothing. . . . Ha-
vana was a singularly lovely city. A rush of
small mementos of its life flooded my mind
the aroma of the cigars, the coolness of the
Telegrafo Cafe and the savor of its Daiquiri
cocktails, the burning strip of sunlight that, at
noon, found its way into Obispo Street. It
was still possible to get Ron Bacardi in the
United States. I was carrying back a large
provision of exceedingly fine cigars, not from
the Larranaga factory, but a slender Corona,
a shape specially rolled for a discrimination as
delicate as any in Cuba. Yet, away from Ha-
vana, they wouldn't taste the same; in the
United States they'd deteriorate; and, where I
lived, there were no fresh, no emerald-green
[245]
San Cristobal de la Habana
limes, and without them a Daiquiri was
robbed of its inimitable flavor.
But what, more than those, I should miss
was the atmosphere of Havana itself, the gay
urbanity and festive lightness of tone. It had
almost wholly escaped the modern passion
for reform changing America, pretty much
all the western world, into a desert of
precept and correction; in many senses
Havana was an oasis in an aridity spreading
day by day. Any improvement wouldn't oc-
cur during my life the habit of lies and self-
delusion had become a fundamental part of
society and all I could hope for was the dis-
covery of rare individuals and cities in which
existence was more than a penalty for having
been born. I wanted them as a relaxation, as
short escapes from a tyranny from which,
really, I was powerless to turn:
I didn't want to live in Havana, nor to be
surrounded by exceptional people; for they
were both enemies of what, above everything,
I wanted to do to write into paper and ink
some permanence of beauty. For that, Ghcs-
[246]
San Cristobal de la Habana
ter County and the solid stone block of my
house were necessary, a temperate climate in-
dispensable. At heart, in spite of my con-
stant fault-finding, my threats of leaving, I
was bound by associations deeper than mere
intelligence. No, nothing so powerful as an
obsession had overtaken me approaching Ha-
vana; I was not, in actuality, an adventurer,
but only a seeker for charm, for memories, to
carry back to the low window to which I had
already referred. The charm of Havana was
its strangeness, the vividness of its sudden im-
pression on me, the temporary freedom, grace,
it offered. It was characteristic of freedom,
too, that, in the end, it became slavery; while
slavery had, at times, extraordinarily the ap-
pearance of freedom. Not a month ago I had
dropped, with a sigh, a gasp of relief, a pen
heavier than anything else on earth, and now
I could scarcely restrain the eagerness the
confidence, at last, of" success with which I
wanted to take it up again.
* * *
When I turned, looking back, Cuba had
[247]
San Cristobal de la Habana
vanished, sunk below the line of the sea. The
Gulf Stream was indigo; along the side of the
steamer, foam hissed with a sharp whiteness,
and at the bow miniature rainbows hung shim-
mering in the spray. The perpetual soft
clouds of the Gulf Stream were very high and
faint. In my imagination Havana assumed a
magic, a mythical, state a vision that, I was
certain, had no absolute ponderable existence.
It.was a city created on a level bright tide, un-
der lustrous green hills, for the reward of
cherished and unworldly dreams. It was the
,etherealized spectacle of the sanguine hopes of
all the conquistadores who had set sail for the
(rubies of Cipango; they 'had had great desires
of white marble cities in .which the women
were lovely and dark, and gold was worked
into the forms of every day.
They, different from the frugal Dutch,
making, with no less daring, the Eastern Pas-
sage in the interest of associated merchants
and of commonwealths, sailed, in a more pic-
turesque phrase, for their Catholic Majesties
and for Spain. The Dutch names, Bonteke
San Cristobal de la Habana
and Sohouten and Roggeveen, had a solid bar-
tering sound compared with Francesco de
Cordoba and Miruelo and Angel de Villa-
fane. Holland had its deathless tradition of
the sea, sufficiently colored with extravagant
adventure ; but its spirit was sober, the visions
of its navigators would never have lingered in
a marble city.
Havana was, perhaps, a Saragossa of souls,
with the acts and thoughts of its early vivid
years, of Carenas, forever held in the atmos-
phere, audible in the restless volume of sound
that was never still. Its history had flashed
through my mind with the turn of a wheel, its
duration seeming no more than the opening
and shutting of a hand ; but now I had an im-
pression not of the transient, not of walls and
names and voices, but of qualities impersonal
and permanent, of something which, while in-
dividual men died, resisted death. It had ex-
istence, that was, as long as humanity drew
a continuous thread of memory through time.
Havana had, outwardly, changed from its first
huddle of bohios and fortified tower; but the
[249]
San Cristobal de la Habana
form it had taken, so different from the dis-
covered reality, had beyond any question that
odd similitude to Marco Polo's reports of
the Grand Khanate. Its final architecture,
pseudo-classic, was more abstract than any
other imaginable order: all the dress that had
ever paraded through the successive stages of t
the city the Cacquies, girdled in feathers, the
brocades of Maria de Toledo and her lady-in-
waiting, Captain Godoy in steel and lace, the
floating crinoline of the Prince of Anglona's
year, painted black nanigos was equally pos-
sible against a background at once fantastic
and restrained.
There was never a more complex spirit than
Havana's, no stranger mingling of chance and
climate and race had ever occurred; but, re-
markably, a unity of effect had been the result,
such a singleness as that possessed by an opera,
in which, above the orchestra and the settings
and the voices, there was perceptible a tran-
scending emotion created from an artificial
and illogical means. For while Havana had
a record dignified in its sweep, it could never
San Cristobal de la Habana
be long dominant either as a city or in its men ;
it had ruled an island but not the world, it
had never been in that latitude a Captain-
general of a hemisphere. No, it wasn't sym-
phonic, but the lesser, more pictorial, per-
formance; it had, I thought, very -much the
appearance of a stage.
This, however was not a denial of the re-
ality of the blood it shed, nor of the sharpness
and danger of its emotions ; it had been a pro-
fusely bloody city with tropical passions often
reaching ideals of sacrifice. It had, too, suf-
fered the iron of oppression, spoken its word
for liberty, the state which, never to be real-
ized, by its bare conception elevated life.
Now, in addition, it was a great port . . .
and yet, though it might have been the fault of
my limitations, I continued to see Havana as
more dramatic than essential; I heard persist-
ently the overture with the themes of Seville,
the crying native airs, the drums of Guinea
played with the fingers. The shining crooked
bay was filled by the plate ships of Mexico
and Peru, with their high-decked sterns and
San Cristobal de la Habana
yellow cannon. The curtain fell to rise again
on Don Miguel Tacon!
It was impossible to determine what I had
seen of Havana and what was merely my re-
flected self ; even hard to decide if I had seen
Havana objectively at all, since my attitude
toward it had been so purely personal. My
memory was composed of what I'd experi-
enced and the reflections, the thoughts, that
had given birth to; and, of them, the latter
were the more real, solider than the Prado,
more tangible than the dining-room of the
Inglaterra. Without them Havana would
have been meaningless, sterile, simply a mu-
seum about which nothing could be written
but a catalogue. It was its special charm to
be charged with sensations rather than facts;
a place where facts not, of a kind, absent
could be safely ignored. Further than that,
ignoring them was, for any measure of plea-
sure, absolutely needful : the pedantic spirit in
Havana was fatal.
What, almost entirely, I had been told to
view, expected to enjoy, I had avoided ; yet not
[252]
San Cristobal de la Habana
that, for it implied a deliberate will, and such a
planning or triumph of character had been as
far as possible from my drifting : I had seen
what I preferred and done what I was; any-
one, following me in Havana, could have
judged me with exactitude. I had spent money
lavishly as though I were rich instead of ex-
travagant for visible returns that would have
only provoked the other passengers on the City
of Miami. They, where they were not driven
to staterooms by the dipping of the steamer,
were vociferous with knowledge about Cuba,
their bags were heavy with souvenirs the
Coty perfumes from France and the table-
linen of the Canary Islands. The pervasive
salesmen, flushed with success and Scotch
whisky, smoking the cigars long familiar to
them in northern hotels, hinted together of the
Parisian girls and criollos, to whom they re-
ferred as Creoles in the meaning and vocabu-
lary of American burlesque. Some officials
of transportation and sugar manipulators sat
aside, with double Coronas, exchanging in
short sentences their hardness of knowledge,
[253]
San Cristobal de la Habana
speaking of Cuba as an estancia of which they
were absentee owners. A flight of winged fish
skittered over the sea, and the clouds following
the Gulf Stream turned rose with the drop-
ping of the sun ; the horizon bore a suggestion
of Florida. Once Cuba, regarded as the shore
of India, had been the center of the West, and
Florida no more than a chimera : how ironic
such errors and reversals were! Now it was
Juana that was legendary, and Florida re-
sembled the significant hooked finger of an
imponderable power. The day slid rapidly
into water that had lost its blueness for ex-
panses of chalky shallow green, and the flat
roofs of Key West and masoned arches became
slowly visible across the sea, and a stir of de-
parture filled the decks.
I was, for a moment, depressed at the defi-
nite leaving behind of Havana for the tran-
quil passage had seemed only an extension of
its spirit and by the imminent reshouldering
of my burden of responsibility. I had never
wanted that, but, without choice, it had been
abruptly thrust on me a responsibility, im-
San Cristobal de la Habana
possible -of fulfilment, which I couldn't put
down. When I was young I had looked in
vain for a perpetual Havana, hoping for noth-
ing more ; and now, when my youth was dead,
I had found the perfection of my desire. - But,
as always, the discovery was too late; I
couldn't stay in the covered paseos, the plazas
with flambeau trees and royal palftis or idle
in a room of Moorish tiles with a dripping
fountain, over a magic drink; my time for the
actualities of charming liberty, the possession
of uncounted days, was gone. But this mood
was nothing more than a gesture, a sentiment,
thrown back to romance.
[255]
24596
