behind an orderly foliage at the Muelle outside, had a dining-room
partly divided by wooden screens that merged informally into the
surrounding halls and spaces, and an air that was an accumulation of
tradition, like an invisible film lying over everything. A
multiplication of unexpected adventitious detail accomplished, in its
entity, the strangeness, at once enticing and a little sinister,
characteristic of Havana. There was, lurking about, in the darker
corners and passages, a feeling almost of dread, uncomfortable to meet.
And, exploring, I passed a room without windows, largely the color of
dried blood, the quintessence of a nightmare. The third floor, laid in a
triangle of, perhaps, ninety degrees, raised immense corridors paved in
black and white marble blocks, down the long perspective of which moving
figures were reduced to furtive mannikins and voices were lost in an
upper murmur.
I sat, for a while, in a walnut rocking chair at an end of the sweep,
which amazed me by an architecture, the impressiveness of which
approached oppression. A wall was broken by a file of slatted doors, and
from one of these came the minute irritable clatter of a typewriter; the
bell at the finish of a line sounded like the shiver of a tapped glass,
and a child spoke. It was difficult to think of the Hotel de Luz as a
place of normal residence, as existing at all except in the mental
fantasias of Piranesi--it resembled exactly one of his sere vertiginous
engravings. Yet it was, I knew, the favorite hotel of travelers from the
Canary Islands.
Continuing to rock slightly and smoke, I pursued the extremely recondite
subject of just such impressions as I had there received: a very
important inquiry, for it had to do with the secret, the unintelligible
heart, of my writing. There was, obviously, in the Hotel de Luz nothing
intrinsically terrifying, strange. My attitude toward it would be
dismissed as absurd by the Canary Islanders. But the effect it produced
on me was tangible, ponderable; it tyrannized over my imagination and
drove it into corridors of thought as sombre as that in reality before
me. I had seen the Piranesi engravings when I was very young and
painfully susceptible to mental darkness and fears; and they had
undoubtedly left their indelible mark ... now brought out by the black
and white marble squares diminishing with the walls in parallel lines.
The reality of what I felt, then, lay in the combining of the
surroundings and my imagination--a condition, a result, if not unique,
at least unlikely to be often repeated. The sum of another emotional
experience and the Hotel de Luz would be totally different, but equally
true with my own; and from that confusion misunderstanding arose. The
actuality was neither concrete nor subjective; yet, woven of these
double threads, it was absolute. The individuality of places and hours
absorbed me; there was no word in English to express my meaning--the
perception of the inanimate moods of place. It belonged, rather than to
the novel, to the painter, and possibly occupied too great a space in my
pages. Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me
than the people in or out of them.
But it was no longer possible, if it had ever been, to disentangle one
from the other, the personal from what seemed the impersonal; for, while
nature was carelessly free from beauty and sentiment and morals, it had
been invested with each of these qualities in turn by a differently
developing intelligence. The elements of nature, partly in hand, were
arbitrarily and subconsciously projected in set forms. I stopped to
think how the mobility of mind perpetually solidified, like cement,
about itself; how fluid ideas, aspirations, always hardened into
institutions, then prisons, then mortuary vaults. Religion had done
this signally, both profoundly and superficially--it was impossible to
picture the faith of John Fox under the frescoes of La Merced Church, a
Methodist exuberance in St. Michael's at Richmond; the Roman ritual was
as much a thing of its silver altars as the Episcopal Church in Virginia
depended on historic communion services and austere box pews.
Not only was I specially intent on these values: my inability to see men
as free from them, as spiritual conquistadores, had been a cause of
difficulty in the popularity and sale of my books. I lacked both the
conceptions of man as an Atlas, holding up the painted globe, or an
individual mounting securely into perpetuity. If the latter were true,
if there were no death, the dignity of all the great tragic moments of
life and art, the splendor of sacrifice, was cheapened to nothing. I
would have gladly surrendered these for the privilege of continued
existence--in a sphere not dominated by hymnology--but, skeptical of the
future, all I possessed, my sole ideal, was a passionate admiration for
the courage of a humanity condemned to the loss of warm life.
I had grown more serious than I intended, than, in Havana, was
necessary; what I had set out to discover was simply the explanation of
my feeling about the Hotel de Luz; but undoubtedly it was better for me
to accept emotions, merely to record them, than attempt analysis.
I had had very little schooling in processes of exact thought,
practically no mental gymnastics. But this was not an imposed hardship
on which I looked back with regret--I had been free to fill my life with
scholastic routine, but balked absolutely: in class rooms a blankness
like a fog had settled over me, from which, after a short half-hearted
struggle, I emerged to follow what, namelessly, interested me. That, for
example, was precisely the manner of my stay in Havana. A course for
which the worst was predicted, specially since I persisted in writing.
And I could see how I'd be censured by the frugal-minded for such a book
as I was more than likely to bring to San Cristobal de la Habana.
There was, in reality, no practical reason to write about it at all,
since it had been admirably and thoroughly described, the sights,
pleasures, and sounds, in reputable and laudatory paragraphs, a source
of pride to the natives. Here no one could predict, in my search, what
would seem important, to be transcribed--the colored glass above a
window, the sugar at the bottom of a cocktail--and my moral sense, of
course, would be as impotent as my political position was negligible.
Yet the qualities ignored by a more solemn intelligence than mine were
precisely what formed the spirit of Havana; their comprehension was
necessary to that perception of an inanimate mood of place.
I was constantly in a disagreement with the accepted opinion of what
were, at bottom, the more serious facts, the determining pressures of
existence; and it had always been at the back of my head to write a
novel built from just such trivialities as, it seemed to me, enormously
affected human fate. A very absorbing idea that had gone as far as an
introduction called A Preface of Imperishable Trifles; but the
realization that I had begun in that manner--a suspicious circumstance
in a novel,--where no shadow of an explanation, a justification, was
permissible, led me to put it away. It was the serious defect of the
novel that it commonly resembled the mechanism of an ingenious lock in
which the key turned smoothly for the flinging open, at the appropriate
moment, of a door upon a tableau of justice. It lacked almost entirely
the fatalities of sheer chance, of inconsiderable accidents, which gave
life its characteristic insecurity.
I had left the Hotel de Luz for echoing stone galleries and streets and
empty paved plazas when I told myself that mine would have simply been a
story of shifted emphasis, for which I should have used my own memories,
since I recalled the wallpaper of a music room after thirty years more
clearly than the details of my father's death, happening when I was
practically mature. The unavoidable conclusion of this was that the
paper, in a way I made no pretence to explain, bore upon me more deeply
than my father; and, with that in view, it was perhaps as well that the
story had remained unwritten.
* * * * *
Some of these considerations returned to my mind the following
afternoon, when my fancy had been captured by a woman on a balcony of
the Malecon. The house was small, crushed between two imposing
structures that had been residences but were now apartments, scarcely
two stories and set back of the line, with the balcony at a lower
window. The woman was neither young nor lovely, but, folded in a shawl,
it might have been one of the lost mantillas, she was invested with a
melancholy dignity. It was possible, in the briefest passage, to see not
only her history but the story of a decade, of a vanished greatness
lingering through a last afternoon before extinction--a gesture of Spain
finally submerged in the western seas of skepticism.
I was extraordinarily grateful to her for standing wrapped with the
shawl in immobile sadness. That was all I wanted from her, the most
indeed, she could give: apart from the balcony, hurrying along the
street with the black lace drawn closely about her head, she would have
been meaningless. The hour in which I saw her, too, the swiftly fading
radiance, had its inevitable part in the effect she produced. I had, I
realized, no wish to restore her to either youth or happiness, I didn't
want to improve her, or the case of Spain, in any way; she was perfect
for my purpose, so eminently selfish, as she was. In begging, in
imagination, the women of Havana to remain on their balconies, I hadn't
given a thought to their welfare or desires.
The truth was that I regarded them as a part of their iron grilling,
figures on a canvas, the balconies and women inseparable from each
other. It might well be that this was no more than the intolerable
oppression of the past incongruously thrust upon the present, and that
at any minute the women, in righteous indignation and revolt, would step
down into life. But if they were to do that, I hoped it would be put
off until I had returned to the land of the feminine free; I didn't want
to be present when the balconies were definitely deserted for the
publicity of the Sevilla. I should regret their loss heavily, those
points of vantage gracefully ranged across the brilliant facades of
Havana. For there was no other city where balconies were so universal,
so varied, and so seductive. I recalled a balcony high over the Rond
Point de Plain-palais, in Geneva, where, on the left, could be seen the
blue line of the Jura and on the right, through the mounting Rue de
Carouge, the abrupt green cliff of the Salve. Curiously, there were a
great many balconies in Geneva giving on many beautiful prospects--the
Promenade des Bastions and La Treille, the Cite and bridged water; but
they were no more than pleasant, they had no deep significance whatever.
The balconies of Charleston were rather galleries turned privately on
gardens and not upon the streets; while those over the banquettes of New
Orleans, of the vieux carre, had long ago been emptied of their
flowered muslins.
The popularity of balconies, their purpose, had remained, until now at
least, largely unchanged in Havana. On Sol Street, in the neighborhood
of Oficios and where it met the harbor, they solidly terminated their
tall windows, reached the heights of discreet tradition. There the way
was so narrow that a head above must be bent forward to see what was
passing, affording a clear view of high comb and bright lips,
provocative in the intimacy of their suggestion. The balconies of the
Malecon looked out, conversely, across the unbroken tide of the sea--in
the afternoon, when it was fair, a magical sweep of unutterable blue.
Yet they had suffered a decline--as though the constant noise of
automobiles had rent an evanescent spirit.
The women there might see, as they chose, either the parade of fashion
or the grey walls and the far horizon; but from the balconies of the
Prado only the former was visible, the whirling motor cars and the
pedestrians in the rows of India laurels. Here the balconies through the
early and late evening were crowded; the chatter, the gesticulations and
smiles, evident on the street. The clothes, however, were no longer
Spanish in characteristic detail, but Parisian; while the essential
atmosphere, the color, of the balconies remained. In carnival--I had
just missed it--they were hung with serpentine and exchanged
bombardments of roses and compliments with the street; but now their
fastness, except to the flutter of a hand, was absolute.
I saw a group of girls at an impressive window of the Prado, on the
corner of either Trocadero or Colon Street, all in white except for the
clear scarlet of one, like a blazing camellia among gardenias; and, for
a day after, their dark loveliness stayed in my mind. They had had tea,
probably, in the corner of a high cool room with a marble floor,
furnished in pale gilt. I had no doubt that a piano had been played for
a brief explanatory dancing, the trial of new steps neither French nor
Spanish, but American. Some of them, I knew, had been at school in New
York--probably Miss Spence's, where balconies were not cultivated--and I
wondered what they thought about the Havana to which they had returned.
Well, if the Cuban men, the fathers and suitors and husbands, preferred
to keep the historic architecture of their society, of their climate, a
convent of some Sacred Heart would be wiser than a celebrated American
finishing school.
The New York scene, however carefully veiled and chaperoned, was a
disquieting preparation for the Prado, or even Vedado. What the life on
an estancia was, I couldn't imagine; I had been told that, for a woman,
oftener than not, it was still a model of Castilian rigidity. It had, in
fact, been suggested to me that I write the story of such a girl, shut
away from everything that she had been permitted to see and desire.
Unquestionably a splendid subject, one of the vessels that would hold
everything an ability could pour into it. I realized at once which, in
that individual struggle, must conquer--the heredity of Cuba would be
more powerful than an isolated feminine need. The other women, the
elders, who surrounded her, would be as relentless as any husband, and
in the end she'd become fat and listless.
Widely different balconies held my attention--on one, flooded with the
morning sun, two women with carnation cheeks and elaborately dressed
hair, but for the rest strikingly informal, laughed an invitation to me
that took no account of the hour. They were, I suppose, tawdry, the
cheap familiars of a cheap street; but the gay orange wall where they
lounged like the painted actors of a zarzuela, their yellow satin
slippers and shoulders impudently bare above chemises pink and blue, all
gave them a certain distinction. Again, in the section of Jesus del
Monte, there were buildings brilliantly and impossibly painted, usually
with cafes on the ground, whose balconies, exposed to an intolerable
heat, overlooked dingy sun-baked fields. They were always empty.... I
could never imagine their use--for there was not only nothing to see,
but no one to be seen by. The houses of Havana, admirable in the
closeness of the city, possible in a bougainvillia-smothered suburb,
were depressingly inappropriate to any contact with the country. They
were lost, detached or strayed away from their fellows; for the happy
plan of the country house was that of exposure to all the favorable
winds that blew, to verandas and open halls rather than balconies and
patios: it was merged into vistas and not relentlessly and jealously
shut on every face.
A fact that had nothing to do with the tropics or the outskirts of
Havana, where wide dusty stone avenues dropped abruptly in soft roads,
and the balconies were added purely from habit. My own balcony, at the
Hotel Inglaterra, was ideally placed, with its command of an angle of
the Parque Central. I often sat there before dinner, or past the middle
of night; there was always, then, a wind stirring over San Rafael
Street; but the balconies on either side of me, above and below, were
invariably empty, their purpose, it was plain, mistrusted.
* * * * *
The patios of Havana, turned so uncompromisingly from the street, were,
perhaps for that reason, even more engaging than the balconies. I saw
them, except those of the government buildings and others semi-public,
through opening or half open doors, or sometimes I looked down into them
from superior heights. They, too, were countless in variety, from the
merest kitchen areas and places of heaped refuse to lovely garden rooms
of flowers and glazed tiling and fountains. This sense of privacy, of
enclosure, in a garden was their most charming feature; and the
possibilities and implications of a patio created a whole social life
with which I was necessarily unfamiliar. They were, usually, in the
hours I knew them, empty but for passing servants ... obviously their
time was late afternoon or evening: fixed to the inner walls were the
iron brackets of lamps, and it was easy to imagine them dimly lighted
and flooded with perfume, with the scent of magnolias and the whisper of
the fountains.
These details, separately, were not rare, but shut into the masonry of
Havana, their beauty shown in momentary glimpses on streets of blank
walls, their fragrance drooping into unexpected barren places, the
patios stirred my inherent desires. As usual, I didn't want to be gazing
at them from without, but to be a part of their existence: I wanted to
sleep on one, in a room nothing but a stone gallery, or watch the
moonlight slip over the leaves of the crape myrtles and the tiles and
sink into the water. But not to-day, for there were discordant sounds
through the arches with slender twisted Moorish pillars--the subdued
harshness of mechanical music, the echoes of that dissatisfaction which
was everywhere now recognized as improvement. I demanded guitars.
The masculine chords of the guitar, the least sentimental of
instruments, as the Spaniards were the least sentimental of people, the
deep vibration of resinous stopped strings, was the perfect
accompaniment to that color visible and invisible. Invisible! Always
that, first and most potent. The perpetuity of atmosphere through
transmitted feeling was far more absorbing than the other chimera, of
incorruption. It was tradition, more than moonlight, that steeped the
patios with kindled obscure romantic longings. Within their formal
squares they held the spirit of a great history and of two great races,
two continents. They, the patios, were the East in the West, the
Moroscos on the Peninsula.
The dress of the present, even the floating films of the women, was
misplaced; these were, in reality, the courtyards of the Orient, and
they needed the dignity of grave robes and gestures, bearded serenity.
In them, initially, women had been flowers lightly clasped with bands of
rubies and dyed illusory veils; there had been no guitars then, but
silver flutes. However, I had no desire to be a part of that time; it
was Spain that possessed me, and not in Grenada but Cuba, during the
Captain-generalship of the Conde de Ricla, in the seventeen sixties
when the British conquests under Albemarle were returned to the island.
That was a period of building and prosperity, the fortifications of San
Carlos and Atares were established, Morro and the Cabanas refashioned,
and the streets and houses of Havana named and numbered. The decline of
Spain, a long imperceptible crumbling, had already begun, but its effect
was not visible in Cuba; there still was a Castilian arrogance burned
more brown, more vivid, by the Caribbean.
A little late for the plate ships sailing in cloudy companies and
filling Havana with the swords of Mexico and Peru; but my mind and
inclinations were not heroic; I could dispense with Pizarro's soldiers,
fanciful with the ornaments of the Incas, for the quiet of walled
gardens, the hooped brocades of court dresses; all the transplanted
grace of the city and hour. Climate was greater than man, and the first
Cubenos, dead in the mines of Cobre, were being revenged for the
usurpation of their happiness and land; the negroes of the slave trade,
too, were repaying their chains to the last link of misery. But these
counter influences were not perceptible yet in the patios, just as the
French Revolution had still to scatter the polite pastorals only to
survive in the canvases of Boucher and Watteau.
It was, in Havana as well as Seville, the farewell of true formality,
for after that it became only a form. No one, afterwards, was to bow
instinctively as he left a room or dance to the measures of Beethoven
and Mozart. A useless plant cut down by a rusty scythe! The elegance of
Cuba, however, changing into later Victorianism, was, in the time of de
Ricla, greatly enhanced by its surrounding, by the day before yesterday
when there had been only thatched bohios where now were patios of
marble. Those quiet spaces were sentient with all this, just as the
patios of the churches held the sibilant whisper of the sandals of the
Inquisition, an order already malodorous and expelled from the island by
Antonio Maria Bucarely, the following Captain-general.
But even yet it would be possible, with the details carefully arranged,
to find an emotional situation in a patio undisturbed since the middle
eighteenth century; for the revenge of the Cubenos and of Africa, of the
red and the black slaves, was that, with the faint or full infusion of
their bloods into their conquerors, dwindled unintelligible desires and
dreamlike passions entered as well. A discoloration of the mind as
actual as the darkening of the skin! And I pictured an obscure impulse
buried in the personality of a sensitive and reserved man, such a trait
as, at moments of extreme pressure, would betray him into a hateful
savagery; or it might be better brought out by a galling secret
barbarity of taste. The Spain of Philip, primitive Africa, and a
virginal island race constrained into one body and spirit must be richly
dramatic.
It was imperative to regard the patios in such a light, with a strong
infusion of reality, for, half apprehended, they produced that thin
tinkling note of sham romance; they evoked, for a ready susceptibility,
the impressions of opera bouffe ... a danger constantly present in my
thoughts. As it was, I should be accused again of avoiding the actual
and the difficult for an easy unreality; but there was at least this to
be said for what I had, in writing, laid back in point of time--no one
had charged me with an historical novel.
There was another, perhaps safer, attitude toward the balconies and
patios of Havana: to regard them in an unrelieved mood of realism, to
show them livid with blue paint and echoing with shrill misery, typhoid
fever, and poverty. If I did that, automatically a number of serious
critical intellects would give me their withheld support, they would no
longer regard me as a bright cork floating thoughtlessly over the opaque
depths of life. Well, they could--they'd have to--go to the devil; for I
had my own honesty to serve, my own plot to tend--a plot, as I have
said, where, knowing the effort hopeless, I tried only to grow a flower
spray. If I could put on paper an apple tree rosy with blossom, someone
else might discuss the economy of the apples.