with the long windows open directly on closed greens and statues of
lead; and to linger, before going down to dinner, on a minstrel's
gallery above a stone hall and gathered company. I'd rather be on a
yacht than on an excursion boat; yet I infinitely preferred reading
about the latter. For some hidden or half perceived reason, yachts were
not impressive in creative prose; there the concerns and pleasures of
aristocracy frequently appeared tawdry and unimportant. Even its
heroism, in the valor of battle and imperturbable sacrifice, was less
moving to me than simpler affairs. Yet there was no doubt but that I was
personally inclined to the extremes of luxury; and this apparent
contradiction brought to my life, my writing, the problem of a devotion
to words as disarmingly simple as the leaves of spring--as simple and as
lovely in clear color--about the common experience of life and death,
together with an absorbing attention for Manchu women and exotic
children and emeralds.
* * * * *
The following day, hot and still, with the exception of capricious
movements of air in paved shaded places, was overcast, the brilliancy of
Havana, of the white and green plazas, subdued. And this softening of
sharp lines and blazing facades 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 wandered 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 nebulous
gray expanse such as might have existed before the beginning of
comparative solidity. I lost all sense of time, the centuries were
jumbled together like mangos 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 became nothing more than the glimmer of a torch in
illimitable dusk. It had been discovered by Columbus, a presumptuous
term used arrogantly in the sense of created; an Arcadian 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
rapacity, the corruption, the diseases, of civilization. A Spanish Cuba
rose--Iberian and yet singularly different--a business of
Captain-General and Teniente Rey, of alcalde and alcaide, of Santiago de
Cuba and San Cristobal de la Habana. The French under Jacques 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 Guzman, the merchant Diego Perez in vain laying the
guns of the Magdalena in defense of the past, had gone. The Cedula from
Madrid, in eighteen hundred and twenty-five, began 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 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 written 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 advantage, as important as a Daiquiri cocktail, as a Larranaga
cigar, but hardly more.
In any other case I should have cheated myself, not only of pleasure,
the relaxation possible to honesty of mind, but of any hope of future
material. The creative habit was the most tireless and frugal in
existence: there was nothing--no experience, person, disillusionment, or
pain--not endlessly sounded for its every note and meaning. No one could
predict 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 historical books on Cuba, left so
largely unread at the Inglaterra, it was probable that they had omitted,
in their effort for literal and conventional emphasis, what might in
their subject be vivifying to me.
This, however, was beyond spoiling--a history 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 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 Arrow of Gold and Dona Rita; no
peignoirs, thank you, but a formality, a passionate propriety, in
keeping with the social gravity and impersonal devotion of the very
young. There must be crinoline--would I never escape from that!--and
candelabra with glittering 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
Francaise, in Cuba Street number seventy-two, and his refrescos at the
Cafe Dominica. In the end he'd leave Havana, having accomplished 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 Street, all the way to Salud; and, past the Tacon
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 neckties. I turned again to the novels on
the table and again let them drop, unattended, from a listless hand.
Tepid water! And I wondered--a constant subject with me--when we should
have a new vigorous American literature, 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 Velvet Glove except as it equally
applied to me; but an intense desire for a fresh talent, an 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 mental
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
restaurant which, because of the windows looking 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 Havana 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 the high concrete building into the dim
neighborhood.
* * * * *
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 progressing; still, I was the first in our railed space; but the
others, who proved to be Americans, soon followed--three prosperous men,
manufacturers I thought, with wives in whom native good taste had been
given the opportunities of large resources.
One of the women--who, in the arrangement of the box, sat beside
me--smiled with a magnetism 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 and ten feet
long and thirty-six feet wide; while the service consisted 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 sharp 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 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, another game in which instantaneous
judgment, skill, and endurance had been carried to such a far point.
There was seldom a fault or error; 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 it jumped to eight to
four, ten to three, anything that could be placed. On the floor a small
company of bookmakers, distinguished by their scarlet caps, shouted in
every direction, and betting paper was thrown adroitly through the air
in hollow rubber balls. Those who had backed at favorable odds the team
now far ahead were yelling jubilantly, and others 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 development--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 practically tied:
there were shrill entreaties, basso curses, a storm of indiscriminate
insults. Now the backers of the lesser couple scrambled 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: 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 appreciable 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 indelibly stamped on
her--and, among the masculine world of Spanish antecedents, she created
a frank center of interest. For her part, she studied the crowd quite
blocking the way below her with a cold indifference, the personification
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
necessarily shifting gaze, and my interest fastened 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 for spiritual freedom and bound by
commitments paramount to her self-esteem. But even if she had been more
daring, less conscientious, 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 married, 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 attractive personality.
She smiled at me again, later, her narrow slightly wasting hands clasped
about a knee--a smile of sympathetic comprehension and unquenchable
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, mechanical 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 Cuban
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 arrangement could be thought of conciliating
the necessities of both dreams and property; but, subjected to the
scrutiny of intelligence rather than sentimentality, it seemed both
impotent and foolish. The impotence certainly, for whereas my
grandfather had thirteen children and my mother four--or was it five?--I
had none. There had always been individuals unrestrained by the
complicated oaths of the wedding service--a strictly legal proceeding to
which the church had been permitted to add its furbelows--dissatisfied
ladies, and gentlemen of the commercial road. I wasn't referring to
them, but to the look, at once puzzled, humorous, and impatient, that
lately I had seen wives of probity turn on their husbands.
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 unrestricted action. This was beautifully
displayed, confirmed, in Havana, where decks were without a single
impediment; and I speculated about the attitude of the Cuban women in
houses barred with both actual and metaphorical iron. Tradition weighed
heavily on their outlook; but there was that club on the Malecon.
Tradition had bound the farm wives of Pennsylvania, yet they were
progressively rebelling against the insanity of endless labor and
isolation. But, perversely, the married 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
impossible 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, escorted 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 predominance of cursing and
the wails of irritably smacked children. The truth was that the citizens
of the United States, in their feverish passage through life, had
decidedly a poor time--either restlessness or ambition or
dissatisfaction destroyed their peace of mind. 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 suffered, 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 Havana women remained;
while nothing but utter 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, with murder on the streets at noon
distinguished by a white ribbon in its buttonhole. The Armenians were no
more precariously situated 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
proceeded, would rapturously exchange a ballot for a seductive ankle, a
graceful breast, or a flawless complexion. Complexion, or rather its
absence, brought immeasurably more supporting votes to the women's party
than convictions. 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 improvement--or it might have
been better babies; I couldn't recall which--who carried a handbagful of
apostrophies to Paolo and Francesca, and that illogical lot, on her
travels. 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 imitation
wreaths of Hawaii, were playing a musical pastiche of many lands and a
single purpose; 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 gentlemen of San
Francisco, I found a whole section of young Cuba.
They returned, in the intermissions, to chaperons complacent or secretly
disturbed, where they had, principally, refrescos; but their attitude
was one of progress and conscious, patronizing 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, already, 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 Havana, of Cuba,
of Spain ... of everything distinguished that saved the world from
monotony.
They danced--the Cuban youth--with notable 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 verandas in the north. A cosmopolitan waiter, anxious to
have me finish and move on, hovered 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,
mingled servility and insolence, dishonesty--my pina colado was diluted
beyond taste--were being flung, with the air of a favor, into Havana.
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 entrancing; but the arbitrary imposition of stupid 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 nationality 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 happiness in Havana
returned.
* * * * *