position in life, avoidance rather than protest, and I surrendered him
to the hospitality of Cuba and the gambling concessions. I wanted, from
then on, only the local scene: there were cities where the foreigners,
the travelers, made an inseparable part of the whole, but this was not
true of Havana; it remained, in spite of the alien clamor, singularly
undisturbed, intact, in essence. But a few streets, a plaza or two, knew
the sound of English, and beyond these the voices, the stores, the
preoccupations, were without any recognition of other people or needs. I
began to wander farther from the cafes of the Parque Central, the open
familiarity of the sea, and found myself in situations where, in my lack
of Spanish, I was limited to the simplest, most plastic, desires.
It was in this manner that I found ear-rings which I secured with a
sense of treasure--they were in the shop of a woman who sold embroidered
linen from Madeira and the Canary Islands, lying haphazard in the lid of
a paste-board box. The patio opened directly from the front room, the
store, an informal assemblage of dull white folded cloths and frothy
underclothes, and outside a very large family indeed was eating the noon
breakfast while a pinkly naked pointer dog lay on the cool tiles with
his feet extended stiffly upward.
I was paying for some towels, and regretting--in a singular composite of
inappropriate words and banal smiles--the interruption of the meal, when
I saw the ear-rings; and immediately, in the face of all the warning and
advice wasted on me, I exclaimed that I wanted them. At this they were
laid on the counter, a reasonable price murmured, and the transaction
was over. I gathered that they had been left for sale by some member of
an old Cuban house, perhaps by a Baeza y Carvajal or Nunez: they were of
pale hand-carved and drawn gold, aged gold as yellow as a lemon--one
pair of open circles an inch in diameter, with seed pearls; the other
the shape of small delicate leaves, with pearls and topazes.
A store unmarked in exterior but surprising within attracted me by some
Chinese-Spanish shawls, mantones, in a dusty show-case; and I discovered
a short, heavily-built Spaniard stringing the hair of a wig against a
background of scintillating costumes for the carnivals, balls, and
masques. We were unable to understand each other, his wife wrinkled her
forehead in desperation over my Spanish; and then, gesticulating
violently, she vanished to reappear with a neighbor, a woman who seemed
to have suffered all the personal misfortunes reserved for school
teachers, who made intelligible a small part of what we said.
They had, it developed, other shawls, shawls worth my attention; one, in
particular, finer even than any of Maria Marco's. This engaged me at
once, for Maria Marco was the prima donna of a Madrid company which had
sung in the United States two years before, and which had given me,
perhaps, as great pleasure as anything I had seen on the stage. But not
so much for the singing--it had been the dancer, Doloretes, who
captivated me, a woman as brilliant as the orange-red shawl draped
before me over a chair, and suddenly, tragically, dead in New York.
The wig-maker had had charge of the wardrobe of The Land of Joy, and he
assured me again that not Maria Marco.... Abruptly there was spread the
sinuous fringed expanse of a blazing green shawl heavily embroidered in
white flowers. I had never encountered a clearer, more intense green or
a whiter white; and, before I had recovered from the delightful shock of
that, a second shawl of zenith blue was flung beside it. The body of the
crepe-de-chine, the weight of its embroidery, the beautiful knotting of
the short fringe--long fringe was an error--and their sheer loveliness,
made them more desirable than jewels; and, prepared to buy them at once
at the price of whatever fiction anyone wanted me to write and would pay
absurdly for, I was lifting their heavy folds when a third mantone was
produced burning with all the gorgeous and violent colors imaginable.
It was, I suppose, magenta--a magenta of a depth and wickedness
impossible for any but Eastern dye; the magenta of a great blossom of
hell--and it was embroidered with flowers like peonies, four spans
across, in a rose that was vermilion, a vermilion that was scarlet; and
the calyxes were orange and gamboge, emerald and peacock blue and
yellow. There were, too, golden roses, already heavy and drooping with
scent in the bud, small primitive blossoms with red hearts, dark green
leaves, and dense maroon coronals starred in white. The dripping fringe
was tied in four different designs....
I asked its price at once, in order to dispose of what couldn't help
being painful in the extreme, and he told me with an admirable
appearance of ease and inconsequence. The shop, that had been only half
lighted by the door, was now tumultuous with color, with China and
Andalusia; the shawl was the Orient and Spain, brutal in its superbness
and as exasperating, as audible, as castanets. However I might act,
hesitate, visibly, I knew that I'd buy it--in an instant it had become
as imperative to me as a consuming vice. It belonged, rightfully, to the
mistress of a Zuluoga or of a Portuguese king, to someone for whom money
was not even an incident; I couldn't afford it even if I wove it into a
story with a trace, a glimmer, of its splendor; but the next day the
shawl was in my room.
Oppressed by a sense of monetary insanity not unfamiliar to me--I was
very apt to buy an Airedale terrier or a consol table with the sum
carefully gathered for an absolute necessity--I set about turning my new
possession into paragraphs and chapters; and it occurred to me that it
had a justified place in the Havana story I had already, mentally,
begun. The polite young men of the time, the decorative youth of all
times, were apt to have collectively a passion for a fascinating or
celebrated actress; and I saw that such a person--Doloretes--would be
important to my plan. Yes, my young figure and his fellows would go
nightly to see her dance.
Afterward, crowded about a marble-topped table and helados, they would
discuss her every point with fervent admiration. Yet she would be too
vivid, too special, to take the foreground--I had wanted no paramount
women in the first place--and I decided ... to kill her almost at once,
to have her as a memory. My boy, most certainly, would find her shawl
exactly as I had; and, bringing it to his room, solemnly exhibit it to
his circle. More than that, I realized, it had given me a title, The
Bright Shawl. I instantly determined to cast the story in the form of a
memory told me by an old man of his youth; and that time, torn by
unhappiness, indecision, and hopeless aspirations, should be made, in
remembrance, brilliant and desirable, wrapped in the bright shawl which
transformed the lost past.
A remarkably good story, I thought enthusiastically; and I fell to
speculating if George Lorimer would print it. He would give it, I told
myself, a wide margin of chance; but, in writing, uncomfortable
necessities often turned up in the course of narrative--I could leave
them out, and damn myself, or keep them and, maybe, damn the story in
the sense of its making possible my writing at all. Not that Mr. Lorimer
personally had any regard for emasculated chapters, but he was addressed
primarily to another integrity than mine; our purposes were not
invariably coincident. A fact which he, with his energetic candor
scoring pretentiousness, had made clear in his generous recognition of
where our paths met.
* * * * *
What was noticeable in The Bright Shawl was that I hadn't gone out for
material, but it had come to me, scene by scene, emotion by emotion. I
had never been able deliberately to set about collecting the facts for a
proposed story; I could never tell what impulse, need, would be strong
enough to overcome the laborious effort demanded for its realization in
words. For this reason I was free to see what I chose without reference
to any ulterior purpose; and when, on a Sunday morning with the heat
tempered by a breeze lingering from the night, I started for the
cock-fighting at the suburb of Jesus del Monte, I was completely at
ease. I had decided in favor of the cock-pit both because it was
essentially Cuban and because I had always detested chickens,
particularly roosters.
It was a thing of total indifference to me what--with steel spurs or
without--roosters did to each other. Alive, they were a constant galling
caricature, a crude illuminative projection, of men at their ridiculous
worst. Their feathered tails, their crowing, their propensity to search
for bits in the dung, their sheer roosterness, together with the sly
hypocrisy of hens, had always annoyed me individually. And, rather than
not, I looked forward to seeing them victimized by their own belligerent
conceit.
I had to leave my cab for an informal way behind some buildings and
across grass, and, as I approached a false stucco facade, a determined
ringing crowing filled the air. Beyond the arched entrance there was an
area of pavement with tables and a limited cafe service; and, seated
near, was a grave individual with a shovel beard and a thoroughly
irritated rooster upside down in his lap. He was cementing a natural
spur over one that had been injured, and drinking, now and again, from a
cup of coffee at his hand. Beyond was the pit, like, as much as
anything, a tall circular corn-crib, painted white, with a cupola. There
was place for about three hundred, with box-like seats whose low hinged
doors opened directly on the sawdust of the arena, more casual chairs,
and--as at the pelota--space for standing on the middle tiers. There was
a box above the entrance, and another opposite, and this an enormous
woman in white embroidery and carpet slippers, and I occupied.
A main had just been finished, and there was a temporary lull in the
noise inseparable, in Cuba, from sport. The sawdust was being freshly
sprinkled when a negro entered the ring with an animated bag; and,
noting the elaborate polished brass scales that hung from the center of
the roof, I gathered that the birds were to be weighed. The second was
produced, tightly bagged, by a highly respectable-appearing man of
unimpeachable whiteness and side whiskers, and the roosters were left to
dangle from the yard. It was to be a battle al peso, by weight and equal
spurs; the first condition satisfied, the spurs were measured, by a
graduated set of pewter tallies; and the uproar was released.
It was deafening--a solid shouting of bets offered in a voice of fury,
together with acceptances, repudiations, personalities, and the frenzied
waving in air of handfuls of money. The two men with the roosters
advanced toward each other and wooden lines laid in the pit, prodding
and otherwise increasing the natural ill humor of their birds, and held
the shorn heads close for a vicious preliminary peck. The roosters'
legs, shaved to an indecent crimson, were bare of hold, every
superficial feather had been clipped; and when they hit the sawdust
there was a clash as of metal. The methods of their backers were
different--the negro, in one of the local coat-like shirts with a
multiplicity of useless pockets and plaits, squatted on his heels,
impassive, fateful, and African; but the man with the orthodox
side-whiskers became at once the victim of a hoarse whispering
excitement. As the other's bird reeled drunkenly about--they were badly
matched and the main no affair at all--his pallid face flushed and he
suggested new atrocities to his champion.
This, it seemed to me, was totally unnecessary, for a wickeder rooster I
was convinced never lived. He was deliberate in his tactics, unwilling
to be robbed of his pleasure by a chance coup de grace, and confined
himself to the beak. Soon his opponent leaned helplessly against the
wall of the pit, while the victor methodically pecked him to death in
small bloody pieces. The negro's face, couched on a charcoal-black palm,
was as immobile as green bronze; but the white was positively epileptic
with triumph. And, when the defeated bird sank in a spoiled dead knot,
he picked his up and, with expressions of endearment, sucked clear its
angry eyes. The preliminaries were again gone through with, and two
large handsome roosters were confronted by each other. As the surging
clamor beat about them I saw that one was undecided in his opinion of
what promised. He flapped his wings doubtfully; and then, as the other
made a short rush forward, he turned and ran as fast as his shorn legs
could carry him. This, considering the contracted round space of his
course, was very fast indeed; the second, pursuing him with the utmost
energy, was unable to get closer than a fleet dab at the stripped tail.
It was a flight not without a desperate humor; but this, it was clear,
was appreciated by no one besides me.
The execrations, the screams, that followed the retreating bird were
beyond belief; the entire banked audience was swept by a passion that
left some individuals speechlessly lifting impotent fists. Unaffected by
this, the rooster, slightly leaned toward the center of gravity, went
around and around the pit with an unflagging speed that should have
commanded an independent admiration for itself. Occasionally the
pursuer, in a feat of intelligence, cut directly across the sawdust, and
a collision threatened ... but it never quite arrived. I lost interest
in the hurled curses, the hats twisted in excesses of rage, in
everything but the duration of the running rooster. It was remarkable;
he had settled down to putting all he had of strength and reserve into
his single purpose.
He had no will to fight, and, personally understanding and sympathizing
with him completely, I hoped his wish would be respected: while he had
provided no main, he had faithfully substituted a most unlooked-for and
thrilling race; making for all time and nations and breeds of chickens a
record for a thousand times around a cock-pit. In some places he would,
perhaps, have been released, returned to the eminence of a barn-yard;
but not in Cuba. When it had been thoroughly demonstrated that he was
uncatchable by his rival, he was incontinently seized and both roosters
were carried, panting and bald-eyed, to a subsidiary ring beyond, not
half the size of the principal pit, where running, or any discretion,
was an impossibility.
I saw him go with regret; he deserved a greater consideration, and I
hoped that, metaphorically in a corner, he would turn and be victorious.
A new individual, a small brown man in soiled linen, had entered the
box, and he at once, in a slow, painful, but intelligible English,
opened a conversation with me. He had, he said, a consuming admiration
for Americans, and as an earnest of his good will he proposed to let me
in on what, in the North, was called a good thing. It was no less than
the cautious information that in the next fight a dark chicken, a
chicken carrying a betting end as long as the Prado, had been entered by
President Menocal's brother. I could, with a wave of the hand, make a
small fortune: for himself, he was unfortunate--he possessed but eleven
dollars and odd pesetas.
* * * * *
I made some non-committal remark and turned a shoulder on his
friendliness for Americans, conscious of a distinct annoyance at having
been mistaken for, well--a tourist. There was no inherent inferiority in
that transient state of being; but it was a characteristic of the
settlers of any given place--settlers of at least forty-eight
hours--that they should regard with tolerant amusement the new and the
uninformed. He did, I thought, my clothes, my cigar, my whole air of
sophisticated comprehension, an injustice; he should have recognized
that I was not an individual to accept readily public confidential
information.
The birds were brought in and weighed, and the person in the box with me
and the billowing white embroidery and carpet slippers excitedly
indicated a lean cream-colored rooster with brown points. I fancied the
other more, and thought something of betting on him when the main
began--the brown bird of the brother of Menocal flashed forward,
launched himself into the air with a clash, and drove both spurs
through the head before him. It had occupied something more than five
but less than ten seconds. Too bad, a deferential voice murmured in my
ear, that I hadn't taken advantage of such an excellent opportunity to
get the better of all the too-wise ones. With but eleven dollars and
some silver he had been cramped.... My interest in cock-fighting faded
before an annoyance that drove me away from the Puente de Agua Dulce,
calculating how much, at the odds I missed, I should have gained.
Money won at sheer gambling, at games of chance which involved no
personal skill or effort, always seemed hardly short of miraculous to
me--magical sums produced at the waving of a hand. Their possession gave
me a disproportionate pleasure and glow of well being; they seemed to be
the mark of a special favor; the visible gesture, the approbation, of
fortune and chance. I had had a lucky night at the Kursaal in Geneva,
playing baccarat, and the changier, a silver chain about his neck, had
reconverted my bowl of chips into heaped gold and treasury paper. But
with that exception, and for some small amounts, I was unlucky. The
occasion just past was an illustration--I was never really disastrously
overtaken, but equally I never reached sensational heights.
There were, certainly, numerous places in Havana for roulette, and
always the American Club for auction bridge and poker; but I found my
way to none of these: there were men who could hear the soundless turn
of a wheel, soundless but for the fillip of the pith ball on the wood
and metal, through the streets and walls of a city; and there were
others who, merely pausing in a hotel or club corridor, would
immediately form about them all the adjuncts of poker--the cards, the
blue and yellow and white chips, the bank president, the shifty polite
individual with pink silk sleeves and a rippling shuffle, the rich
youth.... But, indebted, I suppose, to my spectacled benevolent
appearance, such occasions let me pass unnotified.
I made, however, some effort to find a billiard academy, with the hope
of seeing the professional games and their audiences built up on the
four sides of the tables, common to the Continent; but if there were any
in Havana, they, too, eluded me. I hoped to see bearded champions
embrace each other after chalking their cues and then drive the ivory
balls in red and white angles across the deep green or nurse them about
the intersections of the balk lines. It was very different in America,
where the billiard parlors were a part of hotel life--great rooms with
the level green of the tables fogged in smoke through which the lights
resembled the diminished moons of Saturn; the audience, entirely
masculine, seated on the high chairs about the walls.
The types of women lingering outside, waiting patiently on convenient
benches, were far different from the Latins. Occasionally a youth would
put up his cue, dust the chalk from his fingers, assume his accurately
fitted coat, his soft brown hat, and go out to some girl with whom he
would plunge into a subdued council marked by a note of expostulation.
Strange youth and unpredictable girl! A term of endearment would escape,
there'd be a quick clinging of hands; and, from an imitation gold purse,
some money would be transferred to an engulfing pocket.
But the men of Havana, it seemed, were quite contented to talk, to sit
in a cafe over refrescos or in a parque with nothing at all but cigars,
and discuss eternally, with a passionate interest, the details of their
politics and city. Their contact with life at every point was vivid and,
in expression anyhow, forceful; they argued in a positive tone to which
compromise, agreement, appeared hopelessly lost; and there was in the
background the possibility of death by quarreling. That, in itself, gave
their whole bearing a difference from the conduct of a land where a
drubbing with fists was the worst evil to be ordinarily expected. They
looked with contempt on a blow, the retaliation of stevedores, and we
regarded with disgust a concealed weapon. But where we might still, in
simpler places, defend what was locally called purity with pistols, no
one, to-day, took his politics seriously.
Politics, in the United States, was looked on with cynical indifference,
where it was not a profession, but in Cuba it was invariably the cause
of fiery oratory and high tempers. This had been true of America; even
in my own memory, in the Virginia Highlands, shotguns had been out for a
difference of principals; but patriotism of that stamp had fallen away
before civilization, as it was optimistically termed--the end finally
brought about by prohibition. Discussion in general, that rose in such
volume on the Cuban night, had little part farther north; my own
friends, the men specially, almost never said anything except as a
direct statement; we never met to talk.
They had a particular, a concrete, interest in living, but no general.
Further than that, there was almost no individuality of opinion; the
subjects which made good conversation were definitely and arbitrarily
settled, closed. To open them, to challenge public opinion, was not to
invite argument, but to send men away to the greater safety, the
solidity, of the herd. A good story, the humor of the latrine, was a
better key to respectability than an honest doubt. For those reasons I
wanted to join the arguments, the orations really, flooding the circles
of green-painted iron chairs on the Havana plazas; and, solitary, I
passed envying the ingenuous welding dissent.
I imagined myself suddenly and completely changed into a Cuban, slight
and dark, in white linen, with my hat, a stiff English straw, carefully
laid beside me on a ledge of the paving, smoking a cigar of rough shape
but excellent tobacco. Not rich, certainly, but securely placed in life!
I was, in fancy, the proprietor of a small yet thoroughly responsible
oculist's establishment on Neptuno Street. Since I was no longer young,
and a member of organized society, with a patron or two from the Prado,
I was conservative, but little heated by patriotism; and in favor,
rather than not, of annexation to the United States. My private view was
that Cuba hadn't been conspicuously worse off under Spain than
liberated. The politics of the present, when office-seekers descended
to the nanigos.... Here was the substance of violent argument and
recriminations; the voices, the ideals, of young men beat on me in a
high indignant storm; the names of Cuban patriots, martyred students,
and Spanish butchers were shouted in my ears. Sacred blood flowed again
in retrospect, which should never be allowed to sink infertile; but when
the words Free Cuba were pronounced I waved my cigar with hopeless
derision.
* * * * *
How significant it was, I thought, that, in imagination, I had pictured
myself at fifty. I saw the Havana oculist clearly; his name, by all
means, was Rogelio, Rogelio Mola, and he had a heavy grey moustache
across his lean brown face which gave him an air of gravity that largely
masked the humor, the satire, in his quick black eyes: Spanish eyes with
no perceptible trace of the soft iris of Africa. It was past one o'clock
when his tertulia scattered, and I accompanied him toward his
home--walking to get rid of the stiffness of long sitting--over
Dragones Street, in the direction of Vedado. Not yet, never now, would
he have a house in Vedado itself; that was reserved for the bankers,
planters, and Americans; but he was nicely situated in a new white
dwelling of the approved style, overlooking a common that in turn
commanded the sea.