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SAN CRISTOBAL
DE LA HABANA
_THE WORKS OF
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER_
_NOVELS_
THE LAY ANTHONY [1914]
MOUNTAIN BLOOD [1915]
THE THREE BLACK PENNYS [1917]
JAVA HEAD [1918]
LINDA CONDON [1919]
SHORTER STORIES
GOLD AND IRON [1918]
THE HAPPY END [1919]
TRAVEL
SAN 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_
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
ALFRED A KNOPF
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To
H. J. B. BAIRD
An
Havana
which he is free
to decline in every particular
save the
dedication_
SAN 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 geographical and
family setting. Many men are alien in houses built from the traditions
of their blood; the most inaccessible and obdurate parts of the earth
have always been restlessly sought by individuals driven not so much by
exterior pressure as by a strange necessity to inhabit a barren copper
mountain, a fever coast, or follow to the end of life a river lost in a
savage remoteness, hiding the secret of their unquenchable longing.
Not this, precisely, happened to me, approaching Havana in the early
morning, nothing so tyrannical and absolute; yet, watching the silver
greenness of Cuba rising from the blue sea, I had a premonition that
what I saw was of peculiar importance to me. I grew at once impatient
and sharply intent on the resolving of a nebulous, and verdant mass into
the details of dense slopes, slopes that showed, from the sea to their
crowns, no break in a dark foliage. The sombreness of the leaves
immediately marked the land from an accustomed region of bright
maples--they were at once dark, glossy, and heavy, an effect I had often
tried to describe, and their presence in such utter expanses filled me
with pleasure. It was exactly as though the smooth lustrous hills before
me had been created out of an old mysterious desire to realize them in
words.
Undoubtedly their effect belonged to the sea, the sky, and the hour in
which they were set. The plane of the sea, ruffled by a wind like a
willful and contrarily exerted force, was so blue that its color was
lost in the dark intensity of tone; while the veils of space were
dissolved in arcs of expanding light. The island seemed unusually solid
and isolated, as complete within itself as a flower in air, and
saturated with romance. That was my immediate feeling about Cuba, taking
on depth across water profounder than indigo ... it was latent with the
emotional distinction which so signally stirred me to write.
At once, in imagination, I saw the ineffable bay of Guatanago, where
buccaneers careened their ships and, in a town of pink stucco and
windows with projecting wooden grilles, drank and took for figureheads
the sacred images of churches painted blue. On the shore, under a canopy
of silk, a woman, naked but for a twist of bishop's purple, bound her
hair in gold cloth. From where she stood, in dyed shadow, a figure only
less golden than the cloth, she heard the hollow ring of the caulking
malls and the harsh rustle of the palms. Drawing rapidly nearer to what
was evidently the entrance to the harbor of Havana I considered the
possibilities of such a story, such a character:
She had her existence in the seventeenth century, when Morgan marched
inland to rape Camagueey--the daughter, without doubt, of a captain of
the Armada de Barlevento, the Windward Fleet, and a native woman taken
in violence; a shameless wench with primitive feelings enormously
complicated by the heritage of Spain's civilization, a murderous,
sullen, passionate jade, wholly treacherous and instinct with ferine
curiosity. The master for her, I decided, must come from the Court of
Charles, the London of the Cavalier Parliament, a gentleman in a gay
foppery masking a steel eaten by a cruelty like a secret poison. It
would be a story bright with the flames of hell and violent as a
hurricane; the pages would reflect the glare of the sand scrawled with
cocoanut palms, and banked with mangroves; and, at the end, the bishop's
purple would be a cerecloth and the gallows chains sound in Xaymaca.
But, above everything else, it would be modern in psychology and color
treatment, written with that realism for which the only excuse was to
provide a more exact verisimilitude for romance.
The Cuban shore was now so close, Havana so imminent, that I lost my
story in a new interest. I could see low against the water a line of
white buildings, at that distance purely classic in implication. Then it
was that I had my first premonition about the city toward which I was
smoothly progressing--I was to find in it the classic spirit not of
Greece but of a late period; it was the replica of those imagined cities
painted and engraved in a wealth of marble cornices and set directly
against the tranquil sea. There was already perceptible about it the air
of unreality that marked the strand which saw the Embarkation for
Cytherea.
Nothing could have made me happier than this realization; an extension
of the impression of a haunting dream turned into solid fact. The
buildings multiplied to the sight, bathed in a glamorous radiance; and,
suddenly, on the other hand, rose Morro Castle. That structure, small
and compact and remarkably like its numerous pictures, gave me a
distinct feeling of disappointment. Its importance was historic rather
than visible, and needed, for appreciation, a different mind from mine.
But the narrowness of the harbor entrance, a deep thrust of blue
extending crookedly into the land, the sense of crowded shipping and
massed city, the steamers of the world and broad shaded avenues at my
elbow, impressed me at once with Havana's unique personality.
Nothing, however, was more ingratiating than the long coraline limestone
wall of the 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 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 facades
inadmissible architecturally, yet together holding a surprising and
pleasant unity. No one, I thought excitedly, had ever rightly
appreciated Havana; it required a very involved understanding, a feeling
not entirely admirable. No, it wasn't Hellenic, not what might be called
in the first manner; it hadn't the simplicity of great spirit, a true
epoch; Havana was artificial, exotic: Spain touched everywhere by the
tropics, the tropics--without a tradition--built into a semblance of the
baroque.
It was rococo, and I liked it; an admission, I believe, laying me open
to certain charges; for the rococo was universally damned; the Victorian
period had been equally condemned ... and I liked it. Why, God knew!
Ornament without use, without reference to its surface and purpose,
invited contempt. A woman in a hoop skirt was an absurdity; black walnut
furniture carved and gilded beyond recognition, nonsense. Yet they had
my warm attachment. Havana claimed me for its own--a city where I could
sit at tables in the open and gaze at parterres of flowers and palms and
statues and fountains, where, in the evening, a band played the light
arias of La Belle 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 waiting outside. The deep entrance with
its reflected planes of subdued light and servants in cool linen; the
patio with water, its white arches on iridescent tiles; the dining-room
laid in marble, panelled with the arms of Pontius Pilate, the bronze
lustre of the tiling and the long windows on the Parque exactly as I had
anticipated, together created the happy effect of a bizarre domain. The
corridor on which my room opened was still more entrancing, its arches
filled with green latticework, and an octagonal space set with chairs
and long-bladed plants.
Yet the room itself, perhaps one of the most remarkable rooms in the
world, easily surpassed what, until then, I had seen. There were slatted
door screens, cream-colored with a sapphire-blue glass knob, topped in
an elaborate Gothic scrolling; and the door beyond, inconceivably tall,
opened on an interior that seemed to reach upward without any limit. It
had, of course, a ceiling, heavily beamed in dark wood; and when, later,
I speculated carefully on its height, I reached the conclusion that it
was twenty-five feet above the grey-flowered tiling of the floor. The
walls were bare, white; about their base was laid a line of green glazed
tiles; and this, except for the glass above the French window, was the
only positive note.
The window, too, towered with the dignity of an impressive entrance;
there were two sets of shutters, the inner elaborately slatted; and over
it was a semi-circular fanlight of intensely brilliant colors--carmine
and orange and plum-purple, cobalt and yellow. It was extraordinarily
vivid, like heaped gorgeous fruit: throughout the day it dominated the
closed elusive interior; and not only from its place on high, for the
sun, moving across that exposure, cast its exact replica on the floor,
over the frigidity of the austere iron bed, down one wall and up
another.
It was fascinating merely to sit and watch that chromatic splash, the
violent color, shift with the afternoon, to surrender the mind to its
suggestions.... They, as well, were singularly bright and illogical.
Such glass, such colors, had been discarded from present decorative
schemes; but I recalled hints of them in the houses of eighteen seventy;
I seemed to remember them in pagoda-like conservatories, and at once a
memory of my childhood returned. Not that there were, actually, such
windows at Woodnest, sombre under the tulip-poplars; yet the impression
of one re-created the feeling of the other, it brought back disturbingly
a vanished time with its figures long dead.
Havana was identified as an authentic part of my inheritance. I was--in
a purely inner manner--to understand it, to have for it the affectionate
recognition, the sense of familiarity, of which I have already spoken.
The city was wholly expressed by the fanlight sparkling with the
shifting radiance of the blazing day. It was possible, without leaving
the room, to grasp the essential spirit of a place so largely unseen.
Then it occurred to me that, indeed, I had seen Havana, and that the
wisest thing to do was to leave at once, to go back with my strong
feeling uncontaminated by trivial facts; but a more commonplace impulse,
a limiting materialism, pointed out that, since I had come away for a
change of scene, I had best realize a semblance of my intention. Still
those colors, like a bouquet of translucent tulips, easily outweighed in
importance all that I subsequently gained; they gave the emotional
pitch, the intellectual note, of whatever followed--a mood, an entire
existence, into which I walked with the turning of a sapphire-blue knob.
For the rest the furniture was scant--a walnut bureau with a long
mirror, necessary chairs, and an adequate bathroom like a shaft with
shining silver faucets at its bottom. From outside, even through the
heat of noon, the sustained activity of sound floated up through the
shutters--the incomplete blending of harsh traffic alarms and blurred
cries announcing newspapers.
It was later when I went out on my balcony: across the narrow depth of
San Rafael Street the ornamented bulk of the Gallego Club--the Club and
the opera house in one--opposed a corner against the sweep of the Parque
Central; and to the right, between the glitter of shop windows, poured
an unbroken procession of motors. A great pillar of the paseo below was
hung with gaily covered magazines; a bootblack, wrinkled and active,
with a single chair on a high stand, was cleaning a row of white shoes,
obviously from the hotel; and the newsboys were calling La Politica
Comica in a long-drawn minor inflection.
The sun, that I had seen rising on the undiscovered hills of Cuba, was
sinking behind the apprehended city; it touched the caryatids of the
Gallego Club and enveloped, in a diminished gold like a fine suffusion
of precious dust, the circular avenue, the royal palms, the flambeau
trees and Indian laurels, of the plaza. The whiteness of the buildings,
practically unbroken, everywhere took on the tone of every moment: now
they were faintly aureate, as though they had been lightly touched by a
gilder's brush; the diffused shadows were violet. The shadows slowly
thickened and merged; they seemed to swell upward from the streets, the
Parque; and the buildings, in turn, became lavender, and then, again, a
glimmering white. Only the lifted green of the palms was changeless,
positive, until it was lost in darkness.
A great many people appeared below, moving with an air of determination
on definite ways. The faces of the men were darkened by the contrast of
their linen; I couldn't see their features; but what struck me at once
was the fact that there were, practically, no women along the streets.
It was a tide of men. This, at first, gave me an impression of monotony,
of stupidity--women were an absolute essential to the variety of any
spectacle; and here, except for an occasional family group hurrying to a
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 impenetrable, blank, to the
streets, but open on the garden rooms of patios. And suddenly--while the
moment before I had been impatient at the bareness resulting from their
absence--I was overwhelmingly conscious of the pervading influence of
charming women. Here they were infinitely more appealing than in places
where they were set out in the rows of a market, sometimes like flowers,
but more often resembling turnips and squashes. Here, with extreme
flattery, women were regarded as dangerous, as always desirable, and
capable of folly.
It was a society where a camellia caught in the hair, a brilliant glance
across a powdered cheek, lace drawn over a vivid mouth, were not for
nothing. In the world from which I had come these gestures, beauties,
existed; but they were general, and meaningless, rather than
special--the expression of a conventional vanity without warmth. There
was an agreement that any one might look, the intensest gaze was
invited, with the understanding that almost none should desire; and a
cloak of hypocrisy had been the result; either that or the beauty was
mechanical, the gesture furtive and hard.
For Havana a woman was, in principle, a flower with delicate petals
easily scattered, a perfume not to be rudely, indiscriminately, spent; a
rose, it was the implication, had its moment, its perfection of eager
flushed loveliness, during which what man would not reach out his hand?
After that ... but the seed pods were carefully, jealously, tended. And
here, in addition to so much else, was another shared attitude drawing
me toward Havana--an enormous preference for women who had the courage
of their emotions over those completely circumspect except in situations
morally and financially solid.
* * * * *
My dressing for dinner I delayed luxuriously, smoking the last Dimitrino
cigarette found in a pocket, and leaving the wet prints of my feet on
the polished tiles of the floor. I was glad that I had brought a trunk,
variously filled, in place of merely a bag, as I might have done; for it
was evident that Havana required many changes of clothes. It was a city
which to enjoy demanded a meticulous attention to trifles. For one thing
it was going to be hot, April was well advanced; and the glorietas, the
brightly illuminated open cafes, the thronged Prado and operatic
Malecon, the general air of tropical expensiveness, insisted on the
ornamental fitness of its idlers.
I debated comfortably the security of a dinner coat, slightly varied,
perhaps, by white flannels; but in the end decided in favor of a more
informal jacket of Chinese silk with the flannels. A shirt, the socks
and scarf, were objects of separate importance; but when they were
combined there was a prevailing shade of green.... I had no inclination
to apologize for lingering over these details, but it might be necessary
to warn the seekers after noble truisms that I had no part in their
righteous purpose. Even noble truths, in their popular definitions, had
never been a part of my concern: at the beginning I was hopelessly
removed from them, and what was an instinct had become, in an experience
of life not without supporting evidence, the firmest possible attitude.
A tone of candor, if my reflections were to have the slightest interest
or value, was my first necessity; and candor compelled me to admit that
I thought seriously about the jacket which finally slipped smoothly over
my shoulders.
It was an undeniable fact that I was newly in a land of enormous
interest, which, just then, held the most significant and valuable crop
growing on earth. But that didn't detain my imagination for a moment.
The Havana that delighted me, into which I found myself so happily
projected, was a city of promenading and posted theatre programmes, of
dinners and drinks and fragrant cigars. I was aware that from such
things I might, in the end, profit; but I'd get nothing, nothing in the
world, from stereotyped sentiments and places and solemn gabbled
information.
On top of this I had a fixed belief in the actual importance of, say, a
necktie--for myself of course; I was not referring to the neckties of
the novelists with a mission, lost in the dilemma of elevating mankind.
A black string, or none at all, served their superiority. But for the
light-minded the claim of a Bombay foulard against the solider shade of
an Irish poplin was a delicate question; for the light-minded the choice
of one word in preference to another--entirely beneath the plane of a
mission--was a business for blood, an overt act. And with me there was a
correspondence between the two, a personal exterior as nicely selected
as possible and the mental attitude capable of exquisite choice in
diction. But this was no more than a development of all that I first
admitted, a repetition of my pleasure at being in Havana, a place where
the election of a cocktail was invested with gravity. And, carefully
finished except for the flower I'd get below, I was entirely in harmony
with the envelopment, the adventure, to which my persistent good luck
had brought me.
The elevator going down was burdened with expensive women, their bodies
delicately evident under clinging fragile materials, their powdered
throats hung with the clotted iridescence of pearls; the cage was filled
with soft breathing and faint provocative perfumes--the special lure of
flowers which nature had denied to them as women. It was, I told myself,
all very reprehensible and delightful:
Here were creatures, anatomically planned for the sole end of maternity,
who had wilfully, wisely I felt, elevated the mere preliminary of their
purpose to the position of its whole consummation. More intoxicated by
sheer charm than by the bearing of children, resentful of the thickened
ankles of their immemorial duty, they proclaimed by every enhanced and
seductive curve that their intention was magnetic rather than economic.
They were, however, women of my own land, secure in that convention
which permitted them exposure with immunity, and here; in Havana, they
failed to interest me; their voices, too, were sharp, irritable; and
even in the contracted space of the elevator their elaborate backs were
so brutally turned on the men with them--men correct enough except for
their studs--the hard feminine tyranny of the chivalrous United States
was so starkly upheld, that I escaped with a sigh of relief into a
totally different atmosphere.
The lower hall, the patio and dining-room on the left, were brilliant
with life, the wing-like flutter of fans; and it would be necessary, I
saw, to have my cocktail in the patio; but before that, following a
purely instinctive course, I walked out to the paseo in front of the
hotel. The white buildings beyond the dark foliage of the Parque were
coruscant with electric signs, and, their utilitarian purpose masked in
an unfamiliar language, they shared with the alabaster of the facades,
the high fronds of the royal palms and the monument to Marti, in the
tropical, the classic, romanticism.
Hardly had I appeared, gazing down the illuminated arcade, when a man
approached me with a flat wide basket of flowers. There were,
inevitably, roses, tea roses as pale as the yellow of champagne,
gardenias, so smooth and white that they seemed unreal, heavy with
odor; those I had expected, but what surprised me were some sprigs of
orange blossom with an indefinite sweetness that was yet perceptible
above the thicker scents. I chose the latter immediately, and the flower
vendor, wholly comprehensive of my mood, placed the 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, not so good as I was to discover later at
the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be
sitting, at that hour in the Inglaterra, with such a drink. It elevated
my contentment to an even higher pitch; and, with a detached amusement,
I recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was formally in
effect. Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent,
for it held, in its shallow glass bowl slightly encrusted with
undissolved sugar, the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it
set the mind free of responsibility; obliterating both memory and
to-morrow, it gave the heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and
momentarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal, fears.
Yes, that was the danger of skilfully prepared intoxicating drinks....
The word intoxicating adequately expressed their power, their menace to
orderly monotonous resignation. A word, I thought further, debased by
moralists from its primary ecstatic content. Intoxication with Ron
Bacardi, with May, with passion, was a state threatening to privilege,
abhorrent to authority. And, since the dull were so fatally in the
majority, they had succeeded in attaching a heavy penalty to whatever
lay outside their lymphatic understanding. They had, as well, made the
term gay an accusation before their Lord, confounding it with loose, so
that now a gay girl--certainly the only girl worth a ribbon or the last
devotion--was one bearing upon her graceful figure, for she was apt to
be reprehensibly graceful, the censure of a society open to any charge
other than that of gaiety in either of its meanings. A ridiculous, a
tragic, conclusion, I told myself indifferently: but then, with a fresh
Daiquiri and a sprig of orange blossoms in my buttonhole, it meant less
than nothing. It grew cooler, and an augmented stir set in motion toward
the dining-room, where the files of damask-spread tables held polished
silver water-bottles and sugar in crystal jars with spouts.
* * * * *
The wisdom of the attention I had given to my appearance was at once
evident in the table to which the head waiter conducted me. Small and
reserved with a canted chair, it was directly at one of the long windows
on the Parque Central. This, at first sight, on the part of its arbiter,
would not have been merely an affair for money--he had his eye on the
effect of the dining-room as a whole, as an expanse of the utmost
decorative correctness, and there were a number of men with quite
pretty women, a great asset publicly, who had been given places in the
center of the room. Yes, where I was seated the ruffled curtains were
swayed by the night breeze almost against my chair, a brilliant section
of the plaza was directly at my shoulder, and I was pervaded by the
essential feeling of having the best possible situation.
This was not, perhaps, true of characters more admirable than mine: but
if I had been seated behind one of the pillars, buried in an obscure
angle, my spirits would have suffered a sharp decline. I should have
thought, temporarily, less of Havana, of myself, and of the world. The
passionate interest in living, the sense of aesthetic security, that
resulted in my turning continually to the inconceivable slavery of
writing, would have been absent. But seated in one of the most desirable
spots in existence, a dining-room of copper glazed tiles open on the
tropics, about to begin a dinner with shrimps in the pink--the veritable
rose--of perfection, while a head waiter, a triumph of intelligent
sympathy, conferred with me on the delicate subject of wines, I felt
equal to prose of matchless loveliness.
The dinner, finally, as good dinners were apt to be, was small, simple,
with--the result of a prolonged consideration--a bottle of Marquis de
Riscal. All the while the kaleidoscope of the Parque was revolving in
patterns of bright yellows, silver, and indigo. Passersby were
remarkably graphic and near: a short man with a severe expression and a
thick grey beard suddenly appeared in the open window and demanded that
I buy a whole lottery ticket; a sallow individual from without unfolded
a bright glazed sheaf of unspeakably stupid American magazines; farther
off, the crowd eddied through the lanes between the innumerable chairs
drawn up companionably on the plaza. At a table close by, a family of
Cubans were supplementing the courses of formal dining with an endless
vivacious chatter, a warmth of interest charming to follow.
The father, stout, with an impressive moustache of which not one hair
seemed uncounted or mislaid, regarded his short fat wife, his tall slim
son, and his two entrancing daughters with an impartially active and
affectionate attention. The girls were young, one perhaps fifteen and
the other not more than a year or so older, though they both managed
lorgnons with an ease and impertinent frankness that an older woman
might well have envied, while they talked in rushes of vivid Spanish
with an emphases of delectable shrugged shoulders, and, recognizing an
acquaintance, exhibited smiles as dazzling as only youth knew. The boy,
however, engaged me more strongly; a tone darker than the others, in
repose his face, delicate in feature, was grave, reflective; his smooth
black hair grew into a peak on his brow, his gaze was considerate,
direct, and his mouth sensitive. Cuba, I thought, at its best; and here
that was very good indeed. Any such degree of mingled dignity and the
highly impressionable, of reserve and flexibility, was absent from the
cruder young of the north.
He had, at the same time, an indefinable air of melancholy, a bearing
that, while not devoid of pride, belonged to a minor people, to an
island the ultimate fate of which--in a political word of singular
faithlessness--was hidden in shadow. An affair of mere simple courage,
of execution for an ideal by Spanish rifles in a Cabanas foss, he would
have borne with brilliant success; he'd have ornamented charmingly the
security of a great coffee estate in Pinar del Rio; it was possible that
he might be distinguished in finance; but there was not back of him the
sense of sheer weight, of ponderous land, that gave, for example, the
chance young Englishman his conscious security, the American his
slightly shrill material confidence.
This Cuban's particular quality, it seemed to me, belonged to the past,
to an age when men wore jewelled buckles and aristocracy was an
advantage rather than a misfortune. He had about him the graceful
fatality now so bitterly attacked by the widening power of what was
heroically referred to as the people. He represented, from the crown of
his lustrous hair to his narrow correct dancing shoes, in his shapely
hands and dark fine skin, privilege and sequestered gold. Outrages, I
had heard, soon to be forever overthrown! It was possible that both the
charges and the threatened remedy were actualities, and that privilege
would disappear ... from one hand to another, and great lawns be cut up
into cabbage patches and Empire ball-rooms converted into communal halls
for village rancor.
Not much, in the way of benefit, could follow that. And women in
starched linen collars, with starched theories of civic consciousness,
would hardly be an improvement on fragrant memories of satin, moments of
passion and frailty, and the beauty of tenderness. A maze of clipped
box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority,
for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and
their destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was
immeasurably disastrous. All of this I saw reflected in the boy with
peaked hair at the next table. He took a cigarette from a black silk
case, and I was immediately reminded of my cigar.
It had been chosen with immense care in the Inglaterra 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 hesitated for a minute or more between a
Larranaga and a banquet Corona, and finally decided on the former. It
was as long as the cigar called Fancy Tales, but slightly thicker and
rolled to a point at either end; and the first breath of its smoke,
drifting in a blue cloud away from the window, told me that until then I
had known but little of tobacco. Coffee so black that it stained the
white shell of its cup; a diminutive glass of Grand Marnier, the
distilled last saturation of oranges and fin champagne; and the
Larranaga, the color of oak leaves freshly brown, combined in a
transcending magic of contentment.
The point was--my special inhibition as a traveler--that I didn't want
to move; I had no wish to speak to anyone or see what, particularly, I
should have hurried away to view. That impatience I had served when I
was twenty-one, in Naples; a city uniquely planned for morbid and
natural curiosity. There the animated frescoes of Pompeii had been
posed, at two lire a figure, before my assumption of mature experience.
But now, past forty, I was without the ambition and desire to follow the
cabs of the American business men who, in the company of patient and
fatigued Cubans, were, in the interest of vague appointments, bidding
their families elaborate good evenings.
Later it was inevitable that I should get to the theatres, hear whatever
music offered, and see all the dancing, Spanish and Cuban, in the city
of Havana, but not to-night. My present pleasure was not to be wasted in
the bother of movement and a probable mistake. The cigar continued to
veil me in its reflective smoke for another half hour, there was more
coffee in the pot. The tempered heat of the day lay over me like a
spell, like an armor against the chill, the gaunt winds and rain, of the
north. The scent of the sprig of orange blossoms was just perceptible,
at once faint and laden with the potency of a magical grove.
* * * * *
The weather, the temperature and special atmospheric envelopment of
Havana, was, I was certain, different from any other, its heat modified
by the winds that moved across the island at night, at least from this
shore, and the days flooded with an incandescent sunlight like burning
magnesium. Stirring slowly about my room before breakfast, the slatted
shutters bowed against the already blazing day, a thread of cigarette
smoke climbing hopelessly toward the far ceiling, I thought of the
idiotic popular conviction that the weather was a topic for stupid
minds. The reverse, certainly, was true, since, inbound with all the
settings of life, all nature, the weather offered an illimitable range
of suggestion.
It had been the great discovery of imaginative prose--the novel for
which we care most had been largely the result of that gained
appreciation; and its absence in older books, placed in a vacuum,
entirely accounted for their dry unreality. What, for instance, were the
novels of Thomas Hardy but splendid records of the countryside weather,
for nature and weather were one. This, more than any other force,
conditioned men, stamping them out with an ice age, burning them black
in Africa ... setting royal palms by the doors of the Hotel Inglaterra
and willows along my lower lawn.
The difference between Havana and West Chester was exactly that
difference in their foliage, in the low April green of one and the harsh
high fronds of the other. The quality, the weather, that made the trees
made equally the men, just as it dictated their lives, the houses they
lived in, their industries and planted grains. This was true not only
of the country but of the city, too, of George Moore as well as Hardy;
for though Moore belonged principally to salons and the discreet
interiors of broughams, a good half of the beauty of his pages was due
to his response to the quality of spring against a smoke-blackened
London wall, the laburnum blossoming in his Dublin garden.
The slightest impression of Havana must be founded on a sensitive
recognition of the crystal light and printed shadows which, in addition
to its architecture of fact, brought another of sweeping illusion. In
the morning the plazas glittered in a complete revelation of every hard
carving and leaf and painted kiosk, but later the detail merged in airy
diagonal structures of shade. Modified, infrequently, by the gorgeous
cumulous clouds drifting from the upward thrust, the anchorage, of the
Andes, the entire process of the hours was upset. This was not simply a
variation of inanimate surface, it had an exact counterpart in the
emotions: bowed by an insuperable blaze or upright in the veiled sun,
the attitude of harmony was profoundly affected. The night was
altogether separate, a time, I gathered, when it seldom rained; and
there was never another city that took advantage of the night like
Havana. Released from the resplendent tyranny of the sun, everyone, it
appeared, disdaining sleep, lingered in the plazas, the 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 Cubans thronging abroad, on foot and in motors, early and
late. The whiteness of the buildings, too, even where they were not
illuminated, defined spaces never obscure; the city was never wholly
lost, obliterated by the imponderable blackness of the north. All this,
every aspect of Havana's being, was the gift--the dangerous gift--of its
situation, its weather. The blinding day, the city folded in a sparkling
night, like a vision in blanched satin with fireflies in her hair, were
nothing more than meteorological.
For myself, my entire attitude was different in the room I now inhabited
from the inherent feeling, in New York, of the Algonquin. I was, in
white flannels and brown Holland, with roses against the mirror of the
bureau, another man; not only my mentality but my physical bearing was
changed. Here I was an individual who, moving about for an hour or so in
the morning, spent the day until late afternoon in some quiet and cool
inner spaciousness. That, I appreciated at once, was one of the
comfortable peculiarities of Havana: it was always possible to be
cool--in a cafe with the marble floor sprinkled with water; at the
entrance of the Inglaterra, where, however, the chairs were the most
uncomfortable in the world; or, better yet, with a book, a naranjada,
and pajamas, transiently at home.
For the iced refrescos of Cuba I had been prepared; and at breakfast,
though that, I found later, was not its hour, I chose, rather than a
naranjada, a pina colado--a glass, nearly as large and quite as thin as
possible, of the chilled essence of pineapple. A remarkable, a
delightful, concoction. Later I heard the refrescos referred to
contemptuously by Americans whose attitude toward the Cubans paralleled
their opinion of the local drinks. They elected whiskey, at times
condescending to gin, and the effect was portentous. Some sat near me
now, with breakfasts of bubbling ham and crisped eggs, lamenting the
coffee.
It was doubtless part of the hypnotism of my liking for Havana that
reconciled me to the coffee, poured simultaneously with hot salted milk
into the cup. I accepted it at once, together with a cut French roll
ingeniously buttered. Other efforts were made, through a window, to sell
a wallpaper of lottery tickets; the vendor of magazines now put forward
the Havana Post, printed in English; the curtains hung motionless, a
transparent film on the bright space beyond.
There was nothing I had to do, or see, no duty to myself to fulfill;
and, watching the stir of tourist departure, I was thankful for my
total lack of uncomfortable incentive. I had, for instance, no intention
of ascending the height of Morro Castle, which--I had hardly needed the
assurance--included a fatiguing number of stairs; nor of becoming
familiar with 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
fragment or two, had gone; its early aspects were practically absorbed
by the later spirit that had captivated me. Here, if ever, was a place
in which honesty of mood could be completely indulged.
A state not innocent of danger to the Puritan tradition--lately
assaulted with useless vigor--of suppression; for to the Latin
acceptance of the whole of life had been added the passions of the
tropics. Cuba had cynically realized this, and multiplied a natural
frankness with a specialized attention to the northern masculinity I had
seen leaving the hotel at odd hours last night. I felt even so soon,
with prohibition a reality, that our national prudery was a very
unfortunate influence indeed in Havana. The season was at an end--only a
few days of the racing remained--so I had missed the obvious worst; but
traces of the corruption of the dull, the dull themselves in diminishing
numbers, lingered.
Havana, in common with other foreign countries, and with so many golden
reasons to the contrary, had no general liking for Americans. The few
who had understood Cuba, either living there or journeying with
discretion, were most warmly appreciated; and, characteristically, it
was they more than the natives who were principally disconcerted by the
released waggishness of Maine and Ohio and Illinois. But the majority
were merely exploited. There was, certainly, something on the other side
of the fence, for the Cubans were morbidly sensitive about their land,
their monuments and martyrs, not necessarily impressive to the
Anglo-Saxon heritage and temperament. There were fundamental racial
differences, with a preponderant ultimate weight in favor of continents
as opposed to islands. The fascination Havana had for me wasn't
inevitable; I was only considering with regret, 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 any book-shop I was entirely at home,
contented; and here specially I was prepossessed with the idea of
buying a great number of the novels solely for their covers--in short,
making a collection of Spanish pictorial bindings. But the novels, I
discovered, were, even in paper, almost a peso each; and since I was
reluctant to invest two hundred or more dollars in a mere beginning, the
idea vanished. Their imaginative quality, however, the drawing and color
printing, were excellent, far better than ours; in fact, we owned
nothing at all like them.
They had a freedom of cruelty, a brutality of statement, of truth,
absent in American sentimentality: where women were without clothes they
were naked, anatomically accounted for, as were the men; and the
symbolical representations of labor and injustice were instinct with
blood and anguish. A surprising number of stories by Blasco Ibanez were
evident; and it struck me that if I had read him in those casual bright
copies, without the ponderous weight of his American volumes and
uncritical reputation, I might have found a degree of enjoyment. There
were a great many magazines, mostly Spanish, gayly covered but with the
stupidest contents imaginable--the bad reproductions of contemporary
photographs on vile grey paper; although one, La Esefa, admirably
reproduced, in vivid color and titles, the Iberian spirit of the lighter
Goya.
Though I had been on narrow streets before, I had never seen one with
the dramatic quality of Obispo. Hands might almost have touched across
its paved way, and the sidewalks, no more than amplified curbs, hardly
allowed for the width of a skirt. It was cooled by shadow, except for a
narrow brilliant strip, and the open shops were like caverns. The
windows were particularly notable, for they held the wealth, the choice,
of what was offered within: diamonds and Panama hats, tortoise shell,
Canary Island embroidery, and perfumery. There were cafes that
specialized in minute cakes of chocolate and citron and almond paste set
out in rows of surprisingly delicate workmanship, and shallow cafes
whose shelves were banked with cordials and rons, gin, whiskies, and
wine. There were bottles of eccentric shape holding divinely colored
liqueurs, squat bottles and pinched, files of amber sauternes, miniature
glass bears from Russia filled with Kuemmel, yellow and green chartreuse,
syrupy green and white menthes, the Cinziano vermouth of Italy, Spanish
cider, and orderly companies of mineral waters.
These stores had little zinc-topped bars, and there were always groups
of men sipping and conversing in their rapid intent manner. The street
was crowded and, invariably allowing the women the wall, it was
necessary to step again and again from the sidewalk. They were mostly
Americans: the Cuban women abroad were in glittering automobiles,
already elaborate in lace and jewels and dipping hats, and drenched in
powder. They were, occasionally, when young, extremely beautiful, with a
dark haughtiness that I had always found irresistible.
In my early impressionable years it had continually been my fate to be
entranced by lovely disagreeable girls with cloudy black hair and skin
stained with brown rather than pink. Imperious girls with elevated chins
and straight sensitive noses! They had never, by any chance, paid the
slightest attention to me; and the Cubans passing by with an air of
supreme disdain called back my old interest and my old desire. I felt,
for the moment, very young again and capable of romantic folly, of
following a particular beauty to where her motor--a De Dion
landaulet--disappeared into a courtyard with the closing of the great
iron-bound doors.
A marked, not to say sensational, transformation of my own person had
been a conspicuous part of that young imaginary business; for, though I
was fat and clumsy, I managed to see myself tall and engaging, and dark,
too; or, anyhow, a figure to beguile a charming girl. Something of that
hopeless process had taken place in me once more, now the vainer for the
fact that even my youth had gone. The quality which called back a past
illusion was very positive in Havana, and my feeling for the city was
greatly enriched, further defined. It was charged with hazard for what
men like me had dreamed, leaving the actuality for the pretended; the
pretended, that so easily became the false, was, in Havana, real.
The Obispo under its striped awnings, with its merchandise of coral and
high combs and pineapple cloths; the women magnetic with a Spain that
had slept with the East, the South; the bright blank walls, lemon
yellow, blue, rose; the palms borne against the sky on trunks like
dulled pewter; the palpable sense of withdrawn dark mystery, all created
an atmosphere of a too potent seductiveness. The street ended in the
Plaza de Armas, with the ultramarine sea beyond; and as I sat, facing
the arched low buff facade of the President's Palace, my brain was
filled with vivid fragments of emotion.
What suddenly I realized about Havana, the particular triumph of its
miraculous vitality, was that it had never, like so much of Italy,
degenerated into a museum of the past, it was not in any aspect
mortuary. Its relics of the conquistadores were swept over by the flood
of to-day. Yet I began to be vaguely conscious of the history of Cuba,
of that Cuba from which Cortez had set sail, in the winter of fifteen
hundred and nineteen, for Mexico. Later this would, perhaps, become
clearer to me; not pedantically, but because the spirit of that early
time was still alive. I made no effort to direct my mind into deep
channels. What must come must come; and if it were a gin rickey rather
than the slavery of the repartimento system, I'd be little enough
disturbed.
The gin rickey proved to be an immediate reality, in the patio of the
Inglaterra--a stream of silver bubbles shot into a glass where an
emerald lime floated vivaciously. I had no intention of going out again
until the shadows of the late afternoon had lengthened far toward the
white front of the Gomez-Mena building across the plaza; and after lunch
I went up to the quiet of my room. I should, certainly, write no
letters, read--idly--none of the few books published about Cuba, which
were on my table; and I began the essays of James Huneker called
Bedouins. His rhapsodies over Mary Garden, as colorful in style as the
glass above the window, I soon dropped and picked indifferently among
the novels that remained. A poor lot--the thin current stream of
American fiction, doubly pale in Havana.