doing nothing, scarcely thinking, in the subdued and darkened heat.
There was a heavy passage of trunks through the echoing hall without,
the melancholy calling of the evening papers rose on the air; I was
enveloped in the isolation of a strange tongue. To sit as still as
possible, as receptive as possible, to stroll aimlessly, watch
indiscriminately, was the secret of conduct in my situation. Nothing
could be planned or provided for. The thing was to get enjoyment from
what I did and saw; what benefit I should receive, I knew from long
experience, would be largely subconscious. I had been in Havana scarcely
more than a day, and already I had collected a hundred impressions and
measureless pleasure. How wise I had been to come ... extravagantly,
with--as it were--a flower in my coat, a gesture of protest, of
indifference, to all that the world now emphasized.
* * * * *
However, the tranquillity of the afternoon was sharply interrupted by my
going, unexpectedly, to the races at Oriental Park. I had to dress with
the utmost rapidity, leaving the choice of a tie to chance, for the dun
car of the United States Military Attache was waiting for me. The
Attache, handsomely bearing the brown seal of Philippine campaigns,
abstracted in manner, sat forward with an imperturbable military
chauffeur, while the back of the car was flooded by the affable speech
of a Castilian marquis whose variety of experience in the realms of
expert and dangerous games had been limited only by their known forms.
It was unquestionably the mixture of my commonplace Presbyterian blood
and incurable habit of romance that gave me a distinct satisfaction in
my surroundings. I was glad that the Marquis was what he was and that
he held a trans-continental motor record; it pleased my honest
democratic instincts when other cars were held back for our progress;
and, finally, the deep chairs on the veranda of the Jockey Club were
precisely right for a lounging afternoon in an expensive sporting
atmosphere.
The race track seemed to me long--was it a mile?--and, with the horses
at a starting post across from the grandstand, I couldn't tell one from
another. The grandstand was on the right, and beyond the park were low
monotonous lines of stables. It had been raining, the track was heavy,
and the race that followed the blowing of a bugle covered the silk of
the jockeys with mud. My pleasure, as always, slowly subsided at the
persistent intrusion of an inner destructive questioning. Incontestably
the racing, the horses lining fretfully and scrambling through the muddy
pools, left me cold. The sweep of the Jockey Club, too, was
comparatively empty of interest; the spectators there, though they were
more or less intent upon the results posted on the board opposite, were
not the immemorial onlookers at such affairs of sweepstakes, selling
plates and furloughs.
The Cuban women present, elaborately dressed for shaded lawns and salons
de 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 afternoons on their iron-shod seat
ricks, and women of title, in waterproofs and harsh brogues, tramped
through the sloshing turf ... an attitude far removed from Havana. A
group of royal palms, lifted in the middle distance, alone gave the
races an exotic air; though they were, of course, promoted and ridden by
Americans, and their mechanics were quite those which operated in New
Orleans and Butte and Baltimore. Now I was annoyed because I had,
thoughtlessly, come; I might as well have gone to the baseball game in
what had formerly been the bull ring.
Yet I could retire to my speculations for escape, and I thought how
peculiarly modern outdoor games, sport, belong to the British--to them
and their relatives beyond the sea. I remembered, in this connection,
the story of a French vicomte I knew, a man of imposing build, who, in
yellow gloves, shot field larks attracted by the flashing of a mirror
manipulated by his valet. Le sport! But the Spaniards, bred to the
delicate agility of bull fighting, trained in endurance on the
inconceivably fast pelota courts, were more athletic than the French;
though, as a race, they were inclined to delegate their games to
professionals. The sporting amateur, in spite of the Marquis, was a
rarity; rather they chose to be lookers-on at brilliant diversions which
retained an appreciable amount of a mediaeval cruelty diversified from
our own brutal strain.
This, naturally, had been influenced, strengthened, in Cuba by the
climate, the breath of the tropics; even the winters were not conducive
to violent exercise, aside from the fact that that was the prerogative
of stolid temperaments. It was the deliberate, the unexcitable, who
most excelled at trials of personal muscular skill; and neither of them
were at home below certain latitudes. For myself, I was grateful, for I
hadn't much in common with the exemplifications of field skill I had
met. They were very apt to pay for their success by the absence of the
attributes I particularly admired; often they were snobs of a very
exasperating type--monuments of college beef with irreproachable hair,
sacrosanct pins, and insensate conventional mentalities.
A race at an end, the jockeys, carrying their saddles, trooped to the
judges' stand to be weighed, and I was shocked by their wizened,
preternaturally cunning faces. They were like pygmies of a strange breed
in red and yellow and blue satins; faultless for their purpose, on the
ground they were extraordinary, leather-skinned, with puckering eyes,
drawn mouths, and distorted bodies. They wrangled among themselves in
shrill or foggy voices--a very depressing specialization of humanity.
But the horses were magnificent, slender and shining. I admired them
from a distance, glad that it was no part of my responsibility to ride.
Long ago, under the pressure of an untender emotion, I had learned to
sit on a horse through his reasonable moments; but I had never become at
ease, and I stopped riding when, on the country road of a May Sunday
noon, a tall sorrel ran away with me so fast and so far that we passed
three churches with their scattering congregations.
There were, on the veranda, drinks, and even they--the Scotch
highballs--translated into Spanish, had an unfamiliar and borrowed
sound. It was on my return, stopping at the Telegrafo 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 place; but the Telegrafo was a pleasanter spot
than the New Orleans Stag bar. I could see the beginning of the Prado,
with the swirl of cars on their afternoon round to the Malecon. Some
arc-lights, just turned on, were sources of color, like great
symmetrical lemons, rather than of illumination. After another rain the
bare flambeau trees would burst into fiery bloom.
I was alone, and, sauntering back to the Inglaterra, through the gallery
that had once been the Paseo Isabel, I came on my flower man, who
advanced with a smile and a close nosegay of gardenias. A curious
flower, I thought, getting water for them in a glass. They didn't wilt,
as was usual, but turned brown and faded in the manner of a lovely
pallid woman--a simile I had used in Linda Condon. A flower that
belonged less to nature than to drawing-rooms, to rococo salons and the
opera loges of eighteen forty, and not at all to the present in the
United States. But worn low on the neck, it was entirely appropriate to
the black hair of the Cuban woman. Gold hair, the fair temperament, had
no business with gardenias: bouquets of white sweet peas looped with
pale green and silver ribbon, yes; and dark bunches of moss roses; the
old bouquets of concentric rings of buds in lace paper! They were the
property of the girls I had known, the frank girls with clear grey eyes
and the appealing girls with eyes like forget-me-nots. Something more
poignant, a heavier disturbing perfume, was necessary against a figure
seen only from a balcony or with a vague fleetness behind a grille
gracefully wrought out of iron.
My shutters now were opened, and I could make out, against the dimming
sky, the languid folds of the Spanish flag above the entrance of the
Centro Gallego--the standard that had conquered the western tropics,
only, in turn, to be subdued by a freedom of the wind mightier than His
Most Catholic Majesty.
* * * * *
There was some question of where I'd go for dinner, for in Havana there
were many cafes to explore--the Dos Hermanos, the Paris, the Florida,
the Hotel de Luz, the Miramar; but, finally, I walked down to the Prado,
to the sea and the Miramar, a little because of its situation, directly
on the 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 prepared for dinner in the
restaurant, while those on the terrace were without cloths; but there I
determined to sit, and the waiter whose attention I captured, after a
long delay, agreed.
A solitary couple had their heads together by the window, and they, with
myself, were the only diners. It was, evidently, not now the place to go
to at this hour. Beyond the dining-room, a patio, or rather an open
court, was set for dancing, melancholy as such spaces can be, deserted
and half-lighted; but I saw that a considerable activity was expected
much later.
I was glad that the terrace was empty, for, with the light now faded
from the sea and its blueness merging into black, the remote
tranquillity of evening was happier without a sharp chatter of voices.
The Miramar, considering its place--the most advantageous in all
Havana--and fame was surprisingly small: scarcely more than two stories
high, the sombre maroon walls with their long windows hardly filled an
angle of the Malecon. The dinner was slow in arriving, the silver made
its appearance, a goblet was brought separately, a plate of French bread
was later followed by its butter. The minute native oysters were no more
than shreds adhering to their shells, but they had a notable flavor; a
crawfish was at its brightest apogee; and an omelet browned in a
delicate perfection of powdered sugar.
I deserted Spanish wine, the admirable Riscal, for champagne; for there
was about an air of departed charm, the whisper of old waltzes and
tarleton, that demanded commemoration. The Miramar had been the gay
center of that mid-century life which had folded Havana in the lasting
influence of its memories. A gaiety not even at a disadvantage compared
to the feverish society of to-day! The bodices then had been no more
than scraps of chambery gauze and Chinese ribbon below shoulders to the
whiteness of which the entire feminine age had been devoted. The
flounced bell skirts had swung airily on gracious silk clappers.
The automobiles on the Malecon multiplied, for the night was hot; soon
there was a solid double opposed procession on the broad sweeping drive.
This was a triumph of American engineering and, I had no doubt, an
improvement on the informality of rocks and debris that had existed
before. Yet I should liked to have seen it when the promenade had not
yet been laid down with mechanical precision, in, perhaps, the early
seventies. Then there were sea baths cut in the live rock at the end of
the Paseo Isabel, at the Campos Eliseos, where the water was like a
cooler liquid green air, and where, after storms, a foaming surf poured
over the barriers. There were no motors then, but volantes and the
modern quintrins, with two horses, one outside the shafts, and a riding
calesero in vermilion and gold lace; and, latest of all, as new as
possible, the victorias.
Neither, then, was the Prado paved, but the trees were infinitely
finer--five rows there were in fifty-seven--when the clamor of the city
was, in great part, peals of bells. This was a familiar process with me,
to leave the present for the past in a mood of irrational regret. But
never for the heroic, the real past; the years I chose to imagine lay
hardly behind the horizon; in Italy it had been the Risorgimento, at
farthest the villeggiatura of Antonio Longo or the viole d'amore of
Cimarosa in churches. And now, drinking my champagne on the empty
flagged terrace of the Miramar, facing, across the parade of
automobiles, the blank curtain of the night, starred on the right by the
lights of castellated forts, my mind vibrated with grace notes no longer
heard outside the faint distilled sweetness of music boxes.
As if in derision of this, a loud unexpected music rose from the
bandstand in the Plaza, and I saw that a flood of people, seated or
moving along the pavements and through the lanes of chairs, had
gathered. Nothing, I thought, could have delighted me more; but my
anticipation was soon smothered by the absurdity of the selections: they
were not from 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, locally expressed, that the
Spanish domination was no more. Things, it was said, were better ordered
then. But this was a position the vainness of which I couldn't join: it
was no part of my disposition to combat, or even regret, the inevitable.
My course--quite other--was to project myself into periods whose very
loss formed most of their charm. Gone, they took on the tender memories
of the dead, and were invested with the dignity, the beauty, of a warm
fragility.
Two girls were now seated at a table by the entrance, and, though they
were alone for the moment, it was evident that they had no intention of
remaining in that unprofitable state longer than necessary. Their fleet
appraising glances rested on me and the silver bucket by my chair, and
one permitted the shadow of a discreet smile to appear on her carmined
lips. She was pretty, lightly dressed in a flowery summer stuff, but she
was as gold in coloring as corn silk; an intrusion in Havana I seriously
deplored. The other was dark, but she was, at the same time,
disagreeable; something had annoyed her excessively, and I made no move.
Such company was occasionally entertaining, in a superficial
conversational sense; but, I was obliged to add, not often.
I went over all the informal girls I could recall who had been worth the
effort to cultivate them, either charming or wise or sensitive, and my
bag, unlike Chopin's or what George Moore reported his, was
discouragingly slim. They had been, but perhaps of necessity,
materialists, valuers only of the expensively concrete; yes, the
majority of such adventures had been sordid. It was due, without
question, to certain deterrent qualities in my own personality; but even
more, I was convinced, to the fact that, in America, girls, or at least
those of my youth, regarded emotion as portentously synonymous with
ruin. Emotion, for nice girls, was deprecated; their sense of modesty,
of shame, was magnified at the expense of everything else. This,
together with the tragic difference in the age of marriage in nature and
in society, had condemned the United States to very low levels of
feeling.
Unfortunately I had been born into the most rigid of all societies--a
prosperous and Presbyterian middle-class; an influence that succeeded in
making religion hideous before I was fifteen, planting in me, too, the
belief that man was, in his instinctive life, filthy. I outgrew the
latter, but never the first; and now, looking back, I could recognize
how that lauded creed had nearly damned me to a hell far surpassing in
dreadfulness anything of its own bitter imagining. The cold metaphysical
fog had saturated us all alike.... How dreary my early experience was
... what detestable travesties of passion! A carful of young men soon
stopped at the curb of the Miramar, and the two girls, dark and gold,
were immediately invested with the politest attentions. There was a
chorus of laughter and protests and suggestions, in which a privileged
waiter joined; and afterwards they vociferously left to dance at
Carmelo.
* * * * *
Walking generally in the direction of my room, I left the Prado for an
especially dramatic, no, melodramatic, street, where the bare walls and
iron bolted doors were made startling by the white glare of electric
lights. Fixed to the walls, infrequently, were the wrought-iron brackets
of the earlier lanterns, converted, it might be, for the period before
the present, into gas jets. In that watery illumination such streets
must have seemed less amazing than now, and entirely natural with only
the oil lanterns lifting a small surface of masonry or an isolated angle
out of the night. Indeed, whole districts were dark, except for a rare
lamp privately maintained as an obligation of grace. That darkness, like
the streets, was mediaeval; they belonged one to the other--ways through
which it was congruous to carry a flare and a sword, practical measures
both.
These precautions had been long discarded, but the passages themselves
were unchanged, not a stone had shifted; they were, particularly at
night, the Middle Ages. And it was as though a sudden blaze had been
created by unholy magic; a sparkling and infernal radiance, throwing
into intolerable clearness the decent reticence of the time. The arc
lights gave the streets an absolute air of unreality and tragic
strangeness. Moving in them, I had the feeling of blundering awake into
a dream, of being irretrievably lost in an illusion of potential horror.
An open door with its glimpse into an inner room only increased the
oppression: it, too, was brilliant with electricity, a room of
unrelieved icy pallor, except for a warmer blur under an Agony on the
Cross, where a small company of men and women sat in a rigid blanched
formality that might have been death.
It was quite natural, a commonplace of Havana; but rather than a picture
of familiar life, it resembled the memento mori of a grotto. My thoughts
turned to the symbols and representations of the Catholic Church--a
business of blood and torment and flame, of Sebastian torn with arrows
and a canonized girl, whose name I forgot, carrying her eyeballs in a
hand. Curiously enough, the spirit which had given birth to this
suffering had been popularly lost, together with any conception of the
ages in which it occurred; and all that remained was a pathological
horror. Italy and Spain were saturated by it--Italy in the revolting wax
spectacles of Easter, and Spain with the veritable crucifixions of
to-day.
It was, I supposed, to a certain extent unavoidable in an establishment
whose hold on the ponderable present depended on threats and promises
laid in the future. But it seemed to me unfortunate, to say the least,
that a church whose business was life should be so concerned with smoky
death. Threats and promises! The early history of Cuba, I remembered,
was inbound with the administrative and protective powers of the Church:
in fifteen hundred and sixteen the native Cubenos were put in the charge
of the Order of Jeronimites, localized in La Espanola--Santo Domingo.
The double motive of the Spanish Christian kings in the western
hemisphere had been conversion and gold, but which of these was
uppermost it was impossible to determine. However, when the gold, the
temporal interest, decreased in one locality, the spiritual concern of
Seville shifted to the more productive regions.
That was a period, a conquest, when a violent death was a greater
blessing than living in a state of damnable heresy; and so, between the
saving of their souls and the loss of their bodies in the king's mines,
the natives were thoroughly cared for. It must be said, though, that de
las Casas, a priest whose spirit was above any intimidation or venality,
denounced the outrages against the Cuban Indians to the shining heavens,
the cerulean sea, the Audencia, and the Throne. But his humanitarianism
was ineffectual against a system founded on the belief that a god had
given the earth and its recalcitrant people for the profit and glory,
the servants, of a single religious dogma.
It was, possibly, a mental imperfection which gave impressions,
emotions, such a great suggestibility. Returning toward the Inglaterra,
I had no intention of losing myself in the mazes of applied theology;
and I speedily dropped such a sombre topic from my thoughts. Turning
back to the Prado, I found the walks filled with men, progressing slowly
or seated on the flat marble benches along the sides. Whenever a woman
did pass on foot, their interest and speculations were endless: heads
turned in rows, sage remarks were exchanged, and tentative simpaticas
murmured. Her mother--if she had the slightest pretensions to youth or
good looks--was fervently blessed for so fetching a daughter. Here, of
course, was the defect of the local attitude toward women--it put the
emphasis perpetually on a gallantry affecting the men more even than the
women. There was a constant danger of becoming one-sided.
The Telegrafo and the Louvre were crowded, with more refrescos and ices
on the table than authoritative drinks; the cigarettes of the discursive
throngs in the Parque Central were like a sheet of fire-flies, and the
Marti and Pairet theatres were spreading abroad the audiences of their
second evening shows. The patio of the Inglaterra was well filled, and I
stopped there; not, however, for a naranjada. Some late suppers were
still occupying the dining-room, and a drunken American was gravely
addressing a table and meeting with a mechanical politeness that I
admired for its sustained patience. He left, finally, and wandered
unsteadily, a subject of entertainment for his fellows and a mark of
contempt to the Cubans present. Beyond me were some beautifully dressed
English--two men in the final perfection of easy masculine garb and a
girl, flushed with beauty, in pearls. On the other hand a young
Frenchman, decorated with the most honorable of war ribbons, and two
women, all in mourning, were conversing in the difficult Parisian idiom.
I should have liked to be at either table--their attractions were equal;
but, forced to remain alone, I thought of how rude the English would
have been had I moved over to them. The English would have been boorish,
and the French would have met me with an impenetrable polite reserve.
Both would regard me as an idiot or an agent; to have spoken to them
would have been an affront. And yet I was confident that we should have
got on very well: I was not without a name in London, and the French
were delightfully sensitive to any practising of the arts. The English,
I gathered from their unguarded talk, were cruising on a yacht now lying
in Havana harbor; and I saw myself, the following morning, going off to
them in a smart tender and sitting under the white awning spread aft,
with a whisky and soda, talking or not, but happily aware of the shining
brass and mahogany fittings, the immaculate paint and gay pennants.