inexhaustible pleasure. Sometimes the walls were glazed with tiles and
the octagonal surface of the fountain held the reflected tracery of
bamboo, while a royal palm towered over the balusters of the roof and
hanging lamps were crowned with fretted metal. Another, with its flags
broken and the basin dry, was deserted except for the soundless
flame-like passage of chromatic lizards; still another was bare, with
solid deep arcades and shadows on the ground and a second gallery of
gracefully light arches. There was, in one, a lawn-parasol in
candy-colored stripes with low wicker chairs and gay cushions; on a
table some tall glasses elbowed a syphon, English gin, and a silver dish
of limes, and a blue-and-yellow macaw was secured to a black lacquer
stand.
* * * * *
That, evidently, was not characteristic of Havana, and yet the city
absorbed it, made it a part of a complex richness, a complexity as
brilliantly blended as a rainbow. At first I had been entranced by the
sudden colorful display, it had seemed to be in one marvellously high
key; but now I recognized that it was composed of the entire scale, and
that there were notes profoundly dark. I should have known that, for I
had been, when I was much younger, a painter, and I had learned that
surfaces which seemed to be in one tone were made up of a hundred. The
city, of course, was an accumulation of the men who had made it, the
women who had lived there; and it was possible that Havana had as
intense and varied a foundation as any place that had existed.
Not in the sense, the historical importance of, for example, Athens; I
had already said that Havana was a city without history, which was true
in the cumulative, inter-human meaning of that term. But it had, within
its limits, on its island like a flower in air, an amazing and absorbing
past. In the beginning, where Spain was concerned, Cuba, a fabulous
land, had promised fabulous gold; but the empires of the Aztecs and
Peru, incalculably richer, and the fatal dream of eternal youth in
Florida, had robbed it of royal interest, of men, food, and ships. It
had settled back, lost to most concern beyond a perfunctory colonial
administration, into a region of agriculture, affected only indirectly
by, and affecting not at all, the universal upheaval elsewhere. Within
Havana itself, then, moulded by the burning sun, the cooling night
winds, and the severing water, a peculiarly essential human development
had taken place. And its history was, for this reason, elusive, most
difficult to grasp; hopelessly concealed from a mere examination of
bastions.
One by one the colors of its fantastic design grew clearer to me; period
by period the streets and people became intelligible, until they reached
the middle-century era to which I was so susceptible. To arrive, with
the ingredients of a tropical Spain and the pirates of the world, at an
early Victorianism was a mystery which demanded a close investigation.
That air enveloped all the center of the city, its paseos and plazas
and buildings, and still influenced the social life. This, I finally
decided, came from the fact that the architectural spirit which
dominated Havana was of the period before Eastlake; or at least I was
not familiar with any structures erected in such a style, so lavishly
marble, since then.
There was no absence of modernity in the wharfs and streets, but that
loud impetuous tide poured through the ways of a quieter water, and in
the side passages the sound diminished. Havana was a great port, but the
steam shipping along its waterfront was incongruous with the low
tranquil whiteness, the pseudo-classicism, of the buildings that held
along the bay. The latter particular, elaborated from my first
impression, carried the city back to the end of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the nineteenth. I had no intention of examining the
dates of numerous structures, but the stamp of their time was on the
Ionic entablatures. Then women, as well, had copied in their dress the
symbol of the Greek column, of sculpture instead of painting, except
for the charming and illogical innovation of turbans; and they went
about in sandals and gowns falling straight from their looped breasts.
Such a figure, with her head bound in vermilion, must have been enticing
in the great shaded bare rooms. There must have been, too, an
extraordinary assemblage of negro pages and majordomos in ruby silks and
canary and velvet.
The feminine silhouette changed remarkably in thirty years, from a
column to a cone, from the ultimate in flowing lines to a bouquet-like
rigidity; and the severity of furnishings, of incidentals, expanded in
queer elaborations. It was, notably, a period of prudery, of all which,
objectively, I disliked; while at the same time there had been the
undercurrent of license that always accompanied an oppressive hypocrisy.
This, I could see, was true of its age in Havana: men--the real
prudes--had been heavily whiskered at home with a repressed morality,
and betrayed in another quarter by heredity and the climate. Two periods
that, except for some beautiful books, had been steeped in an ugliness
from which the world had not recovered. Indeed, while it was now
fashionable to deride them, the present was, in some ways, perceptibly
worse: Literature was, perhaps, bolder in scope, but it showed hardly
more than a surprise at the sound of its comparative liberty of speech.
The art of painting had burst into frantic fragments that might or might
not later be assembled into meaning; the architecture had degenerated
into nothing more than skilful or stupid adaptation.
In the large disasters that were sweeping the world, the mad confusion
of injustice and revolt, of contending privilege, the serene primness of
Havana, its starched formality of appearance, offered a priceless
quietude. It was, at once, static and mobile, a place of countless moods
that merged at the turning of a corner, the shifting of a glance from La
Punta to the circular bandstand at the foot of the Prado. Never
pedantic, it was a city more for the emotions than the intellect;
intellect, in its astigmatic conceit, had largely overlooked Havana;
and Havana had missed little enough. Its monuments and statues, where
they were complacently innocent of art, had been brought into harmony of
tone by the atmosphere vivid like the flambeau trees, the inconceivable
blueness of its sea. The colors of the houses, glaringly or palely
inappropriate, were melted and bound into inevitable rightness. Even the
cemetery, frosted with tombs like a monstrous iced cake, its shafts that
might have been the crystallized stalagmites of the caves of death,
resembled nothing more disturbing than the lacy pantalets of the time it
celebrated. It was the final accomplishment of mid-Victorian horror,
with its pit of mouldering bones and solemn ritualistic nonsense; yet
the thought of the ponderous gold and black catafalques rolling in
procession between the horizontal white slabs, of the winking
candles--all the ghastly appendages of religious undertaking--and the
clergy in purple and fine cambric, with amethyst rings on their fat or
their thin fingers, gave it the feeling of a remote mummery.
The cemetery from which I escaped with relief and the cafe that I
entered with pleasure--again the Telegrafo--flowed together in the
city's general impression. I could see the statue of Marti, and, as I
looked, it changed into the statue of Isabel; then that, too, vanished.
The broad paved avenue, the flagged walks, became a gravelled plaza
about which the girls promenaded in one direction to pass constantly the
youths circling in the other. The vision flickered and died, and I went
on to lunch through the Havana of so many days smoothly packed into one.
I felt that my first sense of instinctive familiarity had been
justified; yet, in the corridor of the Inglaterra, asked by a traveler
how to get to a restaurant, the Dos Hermanos, I was unable to reply; and
a third American, brushing me aside, gave him voluble instructions. It
ended by his being taken out and seated in a hack, while the other, in
angry execrable and fluent Spanish, told the driver where to proceed.
Whatever I had learned, it seemed, was of no practical value; my
multiple sensations were not reducible to the simplest demand. A woman
passed with a copy of an ultra popular novel, and this recalled the long
struggle of my early books for the smallest recognition. If that dark
frame of mind had fastened on me in the north, it would have burdened me
for a day; but in Havana, with the Marquis de Riscal and a Por
Larranaga, I envied no mediocre novelist her stereotyped laurels. It was
impossible to get anywhere a better wine or a cigar that changed more
soothingly from the brown of fact to blue fancy.
* * * * *
The Cuban cigarettes, however, were too strong for pleasure; for, while
the preference for a strong cigar was admissible, cigarettes should be
mild. All those famous were. Strangely enough, good cigarettes had never
been smoked in the United States, a land with an overwhelming preference
for the cheap drugged tobacco called Virginia. No one would pay for a
pure Turkish leaf; with the exception of a few hotels and clubs it was
not procurable. There was a merchant on the Zulueta with a large
assortment of Cuban cigarettes, made in every conceivable shape and
paper, hebra and arroz and pectoral. They had tips of gilt or silver
paper, cork, straw, and colored silks, and were packed in enticing ways
and odd numbers. But, after trying their apparent variety, they all
seemed alike, as coarse and black in flavor as their tobacco.
There were, of course, men who disagreed with me--though women never
liked a Cabanas or Henry Clay cigarette--and a connection of mine, a
judge, long imported from Cuba, through Novotny of New York, the
Honoradez tobacco for his cigarettes. He had been in Havana during the
Spanish occupation, and later; and, recalling him, I could see that he,
like myself, possessed an ineradicable fondness for it. In his case,
even, his memories might have affected his exterior, for he had a lean
darkness more appropriate to the Calzada del Cerro than to Chester
County. In summer particularly, with his immaculate linens, and the
brown cigarette casting a pungent line of smoke from his long sensitive
fingers, he was the image of a Spanish colonial gentleman.
He had known Havana at a better time than now, when it was more
provincial, simpler; the hotels then were uncompromisingly locked at ten
in the evening, and if he returned later he was forced to call the negro
sleeping in the hall. I don't remember where he stayed--probably at the
Inglaterra. I was young and ignorant of Cuba when I saw him, with a
certain frequency, before he died; and I heard his talk about the Parque
Central with no greater interest than his discussions of salmon fishing,
of Sun and Planet reels and rods split and glued. I realized sharply
what I had missed, both in the way of detail--the detail most important
to a mental picture and always missing--and in intimate understanding of
Cuban affairs. For he had a tonic mind, rare in America, unsentimental
and courageous, and touched with a satirical quality disastrous to sham,
social, religious, or political.
The cigarettes came to him in bright tin boxes of a hundred; and, after
his death, I bought seven from Novotny and smoked the contents almost by
way of memorial; for he was a personality of a type almost gone. Judges
of County Courts no longer wore immaculate high hats to the Bench, with
the vivid corner of a bandanna handkerchief visible in the formality of
their coat tails.
The silk-tipped cigarettes were for women, but the silk was principally
a villainous carmine, a color fatal to the delicate charm of lips, and I
hoped that I should see none so thoughtless as to smoke them; while the
cigarettes all of tobacco were, frankly, impossible. Why, I couldn't
say; they simply wouldn't do. What women I saw smoking in public, in the
cafes and at the races, were not Cubans. They, on view, neither smoked
nor drank anything but refrescos. But a different feminine world, at
their doors or over the counters of bodegas, enjoyed long formidable
cigars.
An amusing convention, a prejudice really; an act, in women, condemned
from the associations in men's minds, synonymous with that gaiety they
so painstakingly kept out of their homes. Yet, in spite of them, women
smoking had become a commonplace in the United States. In Havana men
were still paramount ... and Victorian. On the Obispo cigarette-cases
from Toledo, of steel inlaid with gold, were for sale; but I'd had
experience with Toledo work--the steel rusted. For years I'd bought
cigarette cases and holders before I finally learned that the former
were a nuisance and that the latter destroyed the flavor of tobacco. I
had owned cases in metal and leather and silk, patented and plain, and
one by one they were mislaid and given away. I had smoked with holders
of ivory and jet and tortoise shell, wood and amber and quills, and
they, too, had disappeared. All that could be said for them was that
they looked well and saved the fingers from nicotine stains.
The Turkish cigarettes in Havana were unremarkable, yet, for the Cuban
youth, the sign of worldliness. They disdained the local brands, but
even Cuba was powerless to depreciate her cigars, the best of all
countries and all times. Here was an accomplishment, a possession, of
unique importance and excellence, for tobacco belonged to the
irreducible number of necessities. I had survived prohibition, with the
assistance of a forethought unhappily limited in execution; but if the
absurdity of my country abolished tobacco, I should be forced to move to
England; that would be too much. I could imagine, in this case, what
comments would appear in the press, reminding the virtuous and patriotic
that my books had always been chargeable with immorality and a blindness
to the splendor of our national ideals.
In the past I had suffered a particularly wretched nervous breakdown--it
hit me like a bullet in the Piazza della Principe in Florence; and when
I had politely been sent to Switzerland to die, an English doctor at
Geneva cured me, for most practical purposes, by impatience, black
coffee, and Shepherd's Hotel cigarettes. I had no doubt that smoking
was, in many ways, a very deleterious habit; but life itself was a bad
habit condemned to the worst of ends. I was, as well, very apt to have
little in common with men who didn't smoke, or, I should say, with men
who had never smoked. They were, with practically no exceptions,
precisians, and ate, lived, for their health rather than for the tang of
delicate sauces and sensations. And a long while ago a wise and charming
woman had lamented to me the fact that all the generosity and
attractiveness she met in men belonged to what were colloquially called
drunks.... Her feeling was the same as mine.
I wasn't defending drunkenness or attacking the statistics against
smokers; what I felt, I think, in such men was the presence of a
fallibility to which, at awkward or tragic moments, they yielded and so
became companions of sorrow and charity, the great temperers of
humanity. At any rate, I demanded enough liberty, at least, to fill my
system with smoke if I willed. The possibility that my act might hurt
someone else failed to excite me--why should I bother with him when I
wasn't concerned about myself! There was too much officious paternalism
in the air, too many admonitions and not enough lightness of heart--of
tobacco heart if necessary.
In addition, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be perfectly sanitary in
mind and body, any more than I was certain of the complete desirability
of a perfected world, of heaven. At once, there, my lifelong occupation
would be gone--novelists never stopped to think what would happen to
them if all the reforms for which they shouted should go into effect;
and I had a disturbing idea that a great deal of my pleasure in life
came from feelings not always admissible in, shall I say, magazines of a
general character. A clean mind and a pure heart were not without
chilling suggestions of emotional sterility. Since men had hopelessly
and forever departed from the decency of simple animals, I wanted to
enjoy the silken and tulle husks that remained. If there was a sedative
in cigars, an illusion in a Daiquiri cocktail, I proposed to enjoy it
at the expense of a problematic month or year more of life always open
to the little accidents of pneumonia or spoiled milk or motors.
* * * * *
What might be called the minor pleasures of life, though in their bulk
were vastly more important than the great moments, Havana had carried to
a high state of perfection; yet with, where I was concerned, an
exception not in favor of the theatre. I went, as I had determined, to
whatever offered, swept along by the anticipation of Spanish dancing and
music: the first was immeasurably the best in existence, and I liked the
harsh measures of Spanish melody, both the native songs of the
countryside and the sophisticated arrangements by Valverde. A great many
skilful writers had described the dancing, and their accounts were well
enough, but, politely, they all lacked the fundamental brutality of the
jota and malaguena, just as the foreign operatic variations on Spanish
themes were reminted in a smooth and debased universal coin.
I purchased a ridiculously flimsy scrap of paper, which, I was assured,
made me the possessor of a grille principal at the Pairet Theatre--a
box, as huge as it was bare, within the stage. I could see, under the
hood, the long dramatic hand of the prompter waving to the droning
monotony of his voice through the stupidest performance I remembered. It
was, by turn, a comedy, a farce, a pantomime, and a comic opera, and a
complete illustration of the evils of departing from national tradition
and genius--a dreary attempt at the fusion of Vienna and New York,
planned, obviously, for a cosmopolitan public superior to the rude
familiar strains of gypsies.
At intervals a chorus of young women, whose shrill excitement belied
their patent solidity, made an incongruous appearance and declamation;
they grouped themselves in feeble designs, held for a moment of
scattered applause, and went off with a labored lightness that
threatened even their ankles. This was bad, but a revista--I could
think of nothing else to call it--at the Marti was, because it was so
much better, worse. There I had an ordinary palco, enclosed by a railing
from the promenade and elevated above the body of an audience composed
of every possible shade from fairest noon to unrelieved midnight. The
evening was divided into two performances, for the second of which,
Arco-Iris, a largely increased price was demanded. This was, again,
Vienna and Broadway, but with, in addition, an elaboration of color and
lighting ultra-modern in intent.
I had seen the same effort ten years before in Paris, and the failure
was as marked in Spanish as in French. Mr. Ziegfield, assisted by the
glittering beauty of the girls he was able to secure, had made such
spectacles brilliantly and inimitably his own. The Latins knew nothing,
really, about legs: they showed them with what was no more than a
perfunctory bravado, while it was a peculiarity of shoulders--the art of
which they so daringly comprehended--that their effect was lost in
mass. The display, the extravagant settings and costumes, of Arco-Iris,
were, throughout, mechanical; the coryphees were painfully aware of
their dazzlements; and an Andalusian number, looked forward to with
weary eagerness, had been deprived of every rude and vigorous suggestion
of its origin.
When I returned to the Inglaterra I demanded of a clerk where I could
find a vulgar performance of, for instance, the habanera, but he shook
his head doubtfully. At intervals, he admitted, Spanish dancers came to
the National Theatre; but--his manner brightened--Caruso was expected in
May. I had no intention of staying in Havana through May; and, had I
been there, I'd have avoided Caruso ... a singer murdered by the
Victrola. Already the seats for his concerts were a subject for
speculation, and it was clear that they would reach a gigantic price,
between forty and sixty dollars for a single place in the orchestra. In
this depressing manner Havana made it evident that it was a city both
fashionable and rich.
There had been a time, too, I was informed, when all the uncensored
moving pictures of the world found a home in Cuba; pictures where
embraces were not limited to a meagre number of feet, nor layettes, the
entire ramifications of procreation, prohibited. But these were gone
from the general view. The films, though, had not been destroyed, and
for some hundreds of dollars a private performance might be arranged.
But this I declined. The moving picture industry had been brought
entirely from America, the theatres plastered with Douglas Fairbanks'
set grin, William Farnum's pasty heroics, and Mary Pickford's invaluable
aspect of innocence. Never, in the time I was in Cuba, did I see a
Spanish actor or film announced; although a picture, appropriate to
Lent, of the Passion, hinted at a different spirit.
I became, then, discouraged by the formal entertainments. As usual, I
was too late; the process of improvement had everywhere marched slightly
ahead of me, substituting for the genuine note a borrowed false
emphasis. To-morrow I should hear the Salvation Army bawling in Obispo
Street. In a state of indifference I went to Carmelo, a dancing pavilion
with an American cabaret, and drifted to the table where the singing and
dancing profession were having their inevitable sandwiches and beer. A
metallic young person with brass hair, a tin voice, and a leaden mind,
conversed with me in the special social accent of her kind, ready in
advance with a withering retort for any licentious proposals. Beside her
sat a Mexican with an easy courtesy and an enigmatic past. He was, I
gathered, the son of an official who, in one of the exterminating
changes of government, had escaped over a wall in his pearl studs and
dinner coat but little else.
I liked everything about him but his indulgence for soda blondes; yet in
the serious conversation we at once opened--connected with a projected
trip of mine to the City of Mexico--we forgot the girl until,
exasperated by our neglect, she lost some of her manner in an inane
exclamation made, she announced, for the sake of Christ. Her companion
immediately returned to his engagement, and I watched the Americans more
or less proficient in that dance the name of which had been borrowed
from a woman's undergarment. It had begun as a chemise, but what it
would end in was problematic.
Was it a healthy rebellion against the prudery of repression or the
adventitious excitation of imminent impotence? Whatever had brought it
about, it was stupid, an insensate jiggling of the body without
frankness or grace. I hadn't yet seen the Cuban rumba, with its black
grotesque negrito and sensual mulata; but I was confident that if a
rumba were started at Carmelo, the shimmy would resemble the spasmodic
vibrations of a frigid St. Vitus dance. The men and women doing it,
galvanized by drink and the distance from their responsibilities,
animated by the Cuban air, were prodigiously abandoned. They were,
mostly, commercial gentlemen and stiff brokers investigating sugar
securities, or the genial obese presidents and managers of steamship
companies. The presidents, the managers and brokers, were invariably
accompanied by their wives, who, for the most part, endeavored to
re-create the illusions and fervors of earlier days; but heaven knew
from where came the women for whom the representatives of Yankee
merchandise were responsible.
Their origins were as mysterious as their age--strange feminine
derelicts stranded by temperament and mischance, caught in the
destructive web of the tropics. The dresses they wore were either
creations or makeshifts, but their urbanity was as solidly enamelled as
their hair was waved or marcelled. There was still another variety--I
had seen them before at expensive fishing camps--tightly skirted,
permanently yellow-haired, with stony faces and superfine diamonds.
Drunk or sober, their calmness was never changed by so much as a
flicker; they caught sail fish in the Gulf Stream, danced, ate, talked,
and now, certainly, were flying, with the same hard imperturbability and
display, in gold mesh bags, of their unlimited crisp money in high
denominations--the granite women on the wall of the Gallego Club.
* * * * *