impressive portico--a portico, attached to a small private residence,
that would have done honor to a capitol building. There was but little
ground, principally extended in a lawn across the front, and banked,
against the house, with the spotted leaves of croton plants, purple
climbing Fausto, and Mar-Pacifico flowers deeply crimson. He had, it was
plain from his walk, a touch of rheumatism, of sciatica really, and he
halted in the Plaza de Dragones to press his thin hand to a leg and
curse, by the Sacred Lady of Caridad, the old age overtaking him.
That, it seemed to me, would not carry his mind toward his dwelling, his
wife grown inordinately fat, and their three daughters, all long ago
asleep; no, it would send his thoughts backward, over the way he had
come--not from the Parque Central, but from youth. He would brush his
moustache reminiscently, I was confident, at a train of gallant
memories, chiefly of New York, where, on the pier of a fruit importing
house, he had spent some tremendous months. That experience had given
him an advantage, an authority, in everything that touched the great
republic, and lent his politics an additional sagacity, his cynicism an
edge difficult to turn. He had intended to stay in America, a journey to
Havana was to have been but a temporary affair; but there he had
attached himself to a wife, the daughter of a grinder of lenses.... And
here he was at fifty, going back, after listening to a lot of nonsense
in the Parque, to his family--in the general direction, too, of the
cemetery.
It was sad, and, for a moment, there was a debate, a conflict, in his
mind: though his age was beyond denial, and his hip troubled him--but
only after he spent an evening on the cold iron chair of a plaza--he
showed no signs of having passed the middle of his life. The grey hair
was distinguished; Madame Nazabal, who was a Frenchwoman, had assured
him of that. The handsome girl in El Corazon de Jesus, the Vedado bakery
where English was spoken, flushed when their hands accidentally met over
the counter. But this mood, his courage, was fictitious; it sank and
left him limping palpably, with an oppressed heart. He was, simply, an
old fool, he told himself, vindicating the humorous comprehension of his
gaze.
If he wasn't careful, the young men of his establishment, over whom he
kept a strict parent-like discipline, would laugh at him behind his
back. They were inclined to be wild as it was, and he suspected them of
going to the carnival balls, the danzons, in the opera house. God knew
that he had seen them in the company of no better than the girls from
the cigar factories. When he was younger--young--that dangerous company
had given a dance on the last Thursday of every month, except when it
fell in Lent, and he had held his place there with the most agile among
them, once even pressing an argument with a man who was reputed to have
been an espada of Castile. A knife had grazed his throat and slit the
left shoulder of his coat through to the skin; the mark remained, a
livid welt under his collar, but the assailant had vanished before he
could kill him. All memory of the girl had gone; but she was beautiful,
he was certain of that, or else why should he have noticed her?
The girls of those days had a--a quality, a manner, lacking in the
present. Their hearts had been warmer, they were less mercenary. Rogelio
Mola detested mercenary women. Now, as far as he could make out, nothing
was possible but rounds of the expensive cafes: the fact was, the girls
only wanted to be taken to the Dos Hermanos, or the Little Club, where
the Americans could see them, and, perhaps.... Then, in about eighteen
eighty, there was some fidelity, some honor, some generosity. There was
romance--that had disappeared more utterly than anything else: he was
more than a little vague in meaning; his romance was an indefinite
state; the glow, in reality, of his own youth.
At that time, in such discussions as had passed this evening, he had
been on the side of revolution, of expeditions to the Trocha, secret
associations; but simply because his blood was hot, his age appropriate
to revolt. He had been, without doubt, difficult; his elders had
predicted a cell in Cabanas as an ante-room, a sort of immediate
purgatory, to hell. He raised expressive shoulders slightly at the
thought of the holy legends: a business for women and priests. The
Church, temporarily, had had some rare pasturage; but the fathers were a
shade too greedy; they had gobbled up so much that it was necessary to
drive them out. Women and priests, priests and women! The latter had
suffered no diminution of their privileges; they had too much for which
the young men, for all their self-opinion, got nothing or next to
nothing in return. Rogelio Mola wondered if the old houses of pleasure
were unchanged.
He had not thought of them for years, and he was contemptuous of men of
his age who did, still, consider them. Not that he was puritanical and
condemned all such institutions, though he had a strong suspicion that
they had deteriorated. For the youth of his day they had been very
largely places of meeting and conspiracy, where traditionally the
sentiment supported attacks on authority. Yet a girl from Lima had
betrayed Mario Turafa, his friend, in hiding, to the Spanish Government.
It was said that Mario had been deported, perhaps to the very Peru from
which came his Delilah, but it was more probable that he had been shot.
There had been one whom he, Rogelio, had liked.... Her name came back to
him, Ana, and the fact that she sang quite beautifully ... nothing else.
The words of a song formed from the melody for a moment audible among
his memories:
"Clavales, clavales
de mi Andalucia!
Mujeres, mujeres--
de la Patria mia!"
It was evident from this that she had come from Andalusia. Thirty years
ago! He wished her the best of luck. Hadn't they been young together,
with at least the innocence of true affection? His thoughts turned
guiltily to his wife, to his daughters white like flowers of the Copa de
Nieva. The twinge in his leg resembled a hot wire; and resolutely he
marshalled his attention forward. How dark, how depressing, certain
reaches of Havana were, and he pictured the cemetery ghostly, icy, in
the night; women, with their confessional, their faith in the
forgiveness of sins, were fortunate. Yet no one must say of him that he
was a coward, that, at the last, he had been borne into oblivion on the
oil of the priests he had disregarded in life. Deep under his
skepticism, however, a low inextinguishable hereditary flame of hope
burned, independent of his intelligence.
* * * * *
My mind returned once more to Rogelio Mola as I was standing outside an
impassive door, waiting for admittance, not far from the Arsenal. It
was the entrance to what he had called a house of pleasure, and, long
established in Havana, unknown to America, one that he might easily have
frequented in the reprehensible period of youth. I had adequate abstract
reasons for my presence, but Rogelio, correctly insistent on a saving
generosity of emotion, had needed no ponderous explanation. Indeed, I
was there in his interest, since, after all, I had imagined him; I
wanted very much to have completely the material of his setting, of the
surrounding from which his friend, betrayed by the Peru that had
centuries before despoiled Cuba, had been led out to be, doubtless,
shot. Not that, pressingly, I felt the need for an excuse, or that I was
essentially making a descent. The very bitterness, the revilement in
solemn terms, of my early instructions, had, reacting, defeated itself.
What was before me, in a world where the pure and the impure were
inexplicably mixed in one flesh, was inevitable; its ugliness lay not
with it, but in a society which, constantly tearing it down, as
constantly projected again the penalty, the shadow, of a perfunctory and
material estate. In addition, as long as the age of marriage, of love,
was so tragically different in society and in nature, an informal
interlude was unavoidable. But I had no need to apologize for anything.
I had been spared the dreary and impertinent duty of improving the
world; the whole discharge of my responsibility was contained in the
imperative obligation to see with relative truth, to put down the colors
and scents and emotions of existence. What, pretentiously, was called
the moral must shift for itself; that depended on what, beneath
consciousness, I was--the justice and sympathy, the comprehension, of my
being.
A slide opened mysteriously on the blank darkness before me, a bolt was
drawn; and immediately I had left the street for a little entresol
filled with lamplight, the breath of scented powder, and the notes of a
piano played by a girl whose cigarette burned furiously on the scarred
ebonized top of the instrument. She half turned, scanning me
indifferently, and went on with her unelaborate music. The woman who had
admitted me, a figure whose instant scrutiny resembled the unsparing
accuracy of a photograph by flashlight, after a polite greeting, ignored
me absolutely, and I was left to follow my fancy.
This led to the patio, larger and more entrancing than any I had before
seen; it was paved in blocks of marble, and the white walls, warmly and
fully illuminated, made a sharp contrast with the night, the sky and
stars, above. There was a tree growing at one side; what it was I didn't
know, but it hung large intensely green leaves into the light before
climbing to obscurity. A great many people, it seemed to me, were
present; and, as I found a seat on an ornamental iron bench, the
formality of a civil greeting was scrupulously observed. The company
was, to every outer regard, decorous to the point of stiffness.
Opposite, two officers of the Spanish navy, in immaculate white with
gilt epaulettes, were drinking naranjadas and conversing with two girls
who nodded in appropriate sympathy. Farther on, a Cuban exquisite, his
hands, in spite of the heat, cased in lavender grey gloves, was staring
fixedly at the shining toes of his shoes. Others--yes, Rogelio in his
youth--their hair faultlessly glossy, were more animated; their gestures
and voices rose irrepressibly and sank in confidences to ears close
beside them.
A row of doors, I then saw, filled one side of the patio, the interiors
closed by swinging slatted screens; the wall at my back was blank, an
exit at the rear, while on the right was the entrance. Scattered about,
with the benches and chairs, small tables held a variety of glasses and
drinks ... the entire atmosphere was pervaded, characterized, by utter
ease. That was, to me, the most notable of the effects of that
enclosure--an amazing freedom from superficial obligations, from the
burdensome conventions which, so largely a part of existence, had come
to be accepted either subconsciously or as a necessary evil. I realized
for the first time the inanity of imposed pretences, the thick, the
suffocating armor of triviality that criminally and ludicrously muffled
life.
There were present, of course, all the poses of humanity, and a great
many of its conventions; the girls were not hippogriffs, but
girls--timid, bold, religious, skeptical, feminine, sentimental, happy
and unhappy, hopeful and hopeless. Yet, in contradiction to this, the
air offered a complete release from a thousand small irritating
pressures. It came, partly, from the sense that here I was outside the
order, the legality, the explicit purpose, of the forces organizing the
world. I had stepped, as it were, from time, immediacy, to timelessness.
The patio into which I was shut might have been on that earth the
ancients conceived of as round and flat as a plate. No discovery, no
wisdom accumulated by centuries and supreme sacrifices, had any bearing,
any importance, in my circumstances now. I was contemporaneous with the
lives precariously spent between the ebb and flood of the ice ages. The
animals knew as much. But if I had nothing to gain from all that was
successively admirable, nothing was lost that had been implicit in the
beginning, nothing at the last end would be changed.
The conversation fluctuated about me, the glasses were carried away and
brought back refilled; the smoke of cigars and cigarettes floated
tranquilly up and was lost above the illumination, and I completely
dropped the embarrassment which came from an uncertainty in such minor
customs as existed. I was, in fact, extremely comfortable when I
understood that I was left entirely to my own desires. These included
the offer, in clumsy Spanish, of a general order of drinks; and there
was a revival of polite phrases. Not all, by a half, accepted; the
others bowed, gravely or cheerfully; and I retired again to my
speculations.
These were mainly gathered about the regret that the scene before me was
practically forbidden to American novels. It had, in reality, no place
in the United States, and, therefore, could claim no legitimate page in
American literature. There, anyhow, it could be said for public morals,
such things were nearly all that the word vice implied. What, exactly, I
was lamenting, was the old fundamental lack of candor in the American
attitude. This, beyond question, proceeded from the people themselves,
and not from commissions; an enormous majority, except for that national
whispered currency of obscenity, was prudish beyond reclamation. For
them, it was probable, the innocence of the body had been branded
eternally. And I was neither a martyr nor a reformer. The loss to me was
considerable--as it was, dealing with only the outer garments of fact, I
had been accused of lasciviousness or something of the kind--and I
envied the French the cool logic of their mentality, the cultivation of
the French audience.
My mind reverted to Jurgen, the remarkable narrative of James Cabell's,
that had been suppressed; a summary act of disturbing irony. For Mr.
Cabell had spent a life, practically, reaching from the imagination of
childhood to the performance of maturity, in a mental preoccupation
with disembodied purity. He had set up, in his heart and in his books,
the high altar of mediaeval Platonism--an image of desire never to be
clasped, reached, from earth; a consolation, really, for the
earth-bound. But that, in the mind, the characteristic mind, of America,
had not had the weight, the value, of a dandelion's gossamer seed. It
was, definitely, a land that cared nothing for literature, the casting
of transient life into the permanence of beautiful form. As the world
advanced in years, the general importance of literature, it seemed to
me, diminished; the truth was that people didn't care for it.
* * * * *
The ladies of pleasure--the merest identifying phrase, since, in the
first place, they were practically all at the age of immaturity--were
dressed in evening satins, cut generally with an effective simplicity,
or the lacy whiteness still better adapted to the young person. In the
tropical patio with its canopy of broad green leaves and night, the
marble pavement and alabaster walls, they were brilliantly effective;
it was only after an extended regard, carefully casual, that I
appreciated the amazing diversity of their individuality, the gamut of
bloods run. There were no Anglo-Saxons--they were faithful to the
traditions of their latitude--and there was no positive Africa; but
there was Africa in faint dilutions, in attenuations traced from lands
remote as Tartary:
There was, for example, a girl so blanched that I saw she wasn't white
at all; her face, even without its drenching of powder, was the color of
the rice-paper cigarette she smoked, walking indolently by; and her hair
was a blazing mass of undyed red. Her features, her nose, and the
pinched blue corners of her eyes, the crinkling tendency of her piled
hair--its authenticity unmistakable in a strong vivid sheen--showed the
secret that lay back of her exotic appalling splendor. Her progress
across the patio was a slender undulation, and her gaze was fixed, her
attention lost, in an abstraction to which there was no key. No
imagination could have pictured such a striking figure nor placed her so
exactly in the ultimate setting:
Here she was artificial--there were long jet ear-rings against her
neck--and savage. In her silk stocking, I had every reason to suspect,
there was a knife's thin steel leaf; but who could predict the emotions,
no--instincts, to which it was servant? Who, trivial with the
trivialities of to-day, could foretell, trifling with her, what
incentive might drive the steel deep up under his arm? Hers would be a
dreadful face to see, in its flaming corona, in the last agonizing
wrench of consciousness.
Seated, and talking earnestly to a Cuban with worried eyes, was a small
round brown girl in candy green, whose feet in childish kid slippers and
soft hands bore an expression of flawless innocence. Clasped above an
elbow was an enamelled gold band, such as youth no longer wore, with a
hinge and fine gold chain securing the lock. She touched it once,
absent-mindedly, and I wondered what was its potency of association;
when, at a turn of her wrist, she drained a glass of brandy, an act of
revealing incongruity. She was, I recognized from her speech, Spanish,
from the Peninsula; and another, who told me that her city was Bilbao,
dispassionately, for a little, occupied my bench. Bilbao, she explained,
was not beautiful ... a place of industry and money. Nor was she
charming, she was too harsh; but her personality had an unmistakable
national flavor, like that of Castell de Remey wine. I was relieved when
she rose abruptly and disappeared into the entresol, where the piano was
still being intermittently played.
The screen door to a room swung open, and a large rosy creature;
negligent and sleepy, appeared momentarily, gazing with a yawn, a flash
of faultless teeth, over the assemblage. She was without a dress, but
her hair was intricately up, and a froth of underclothes with knots of
canary yellow ribbons and yellow clocked stockings made a surprising
foreground for the painfully realistic Crucifixion hanging on the wall
within. The cross was ebony and the figure in a silver-like metal, the
Passion portrayed by a gaunt rigidity of suffering. The screen closed on
the tableau of contrast, and the patio resumed its appearance of a
vaguely distorted formal occasion.
Whatever my feelings should have been, there was no doubt that--if for
the extreme pictorial quality alone--my interest was highly engaged. My
interest and not my indignations! I was not, it must be admitted,
commendably outraged, or filled with the impulse to rescue, to save,
anyone, however young. I seriously questioned my ability to offer
salvation, since I lacked the distinctly sustaining conviction of
superiority; I couldn't, offhand, guarantee anything. Suppose, for
argument, I took one--the youngest--and haled her away from her
deplorable situation: what was open to her, to us? Would she have
preferred, stayed for an hour in, any of the tepid conventional Magdalen
homes, if there were such establishments in Havana?
I had a vision of appearing with her wrapped in a frivolous cloak,
before the experienced wisdom of the Inglaterra manager, in the
corridor of American salesmen, among the wives of the vice-presidents of
steamship companies, and explaining that I was delivering my companion
from the wage of death. I should have been, and very properly, put under
restraint and Dr. Laine hurriedly summoned. In all probability, and with
the utmost discretion, they'd have sent Pilar, or Manuelita, back to the
patio with the doors, explaining to her that I was demented.
There were, undoubtedly, better places for girls of fifteen, and they
would have been the first to choose them if a choice had been
possible--some would have been wives and some opera singers and all,
with wishing so free, uncommonly beautiful. I had an idea that a number
of them would have gone no further than the last, and, as well they
might, left the rest to chance. But their ideas of beauty must have been
stupid compared to what they actually possessed.
There was a girl with a trace of Chinese in the flattened oval of her
countenance, and heavy black hair, as severe as a metal casing,
redolent with fascination. She sat withdrawn from the others with her
hands clasped in the lap of a fine white dress. She was delicate, but
not thin, though her neck was so slender that the weight of her head
seemed bent a little forward. I had never before seen skin so faintly
and evenly golden; there wasn't a flush, a differently shaded surface,
anywhere visible. A sultry air hung about her mouth, the under lip
brushed with carmine. Her eyes, lowered and almost shut, were large, and
their lids were as smooth as ivory. But she wasn't, otherwise,
suggestive of that; she more nearly resembled the magic glow of an apple
of Hesperides.
If I had encountered her twenty years earlier, my experience would have
been richer by a glimpse of her involved image-like charm. She was,
conceivably, to the superficial West, dull: it was evident that she
almost never talked--the girls about were not her friends--but she had
qualities, aspects, infinitely preferable to a flow of words. I should
have asked of her hardly more than, at present, she was, sitting quite
a distance from me and fundamentally unaware of my existence. I debated
whether she would be more attractive in the sleeve coat and jade pins of
China or in her virginal white muslin.... That now was the circumference
of my duty toward her--to put her in such colors, such surroundings, as
would infinitely multiply her mystery.
It was, I realized, time for me to leave--I wasn't Rogelio Mola in his
youth--and I paid the inconsequential price of the drinks I had ordered.
There were adieux, as civil and impersonal as my welcome, and the door
to the street was opened to let me, together with a breath of the
scented powder, out. The arcade before me sounded for a moment with the
smooth falling of a latch, and then all trace of the near presence of so
much lightness was obliterated. In memory it seemed slightly unreal, a
dangerous fantasy of murmurs and subdued, knife-like passions--the
bleached soul of Africa with massed red hair; a frivolity of yellow
ribbons against a silver tormented Christ; the inertia of the East in a
heavy-eyed child; but, to balance this, I remembered the girl, like a
harsh native wine, from Bilbao, an industrial city and very rich: she
restored to the scene its ordinary normal reality.
* * * * *
The high empty austerity of my room enveloped me in a happy
tranquillity; its effect was exactly that of increasing age,
substituting for the violent contrasts of life an impersonal spacious
whiteness. I very placidly prepared for the cool fresh linen of my bed,
my mind filled with fresh cool thoughts. More definitely than ever
before I was accepting and accommodating myself to the passage of time.
I was not only reconciled to having left forty forever behind, but I
welcomed a release from the earlier struggles of resentment and desire.
The joys of youth, or anyhow in my case, had been out of proportion to
their penalties: I had failed at school, at the academies of art, and,
more conspicuously still, as a citizen. I was even incapable of
supporting myself, a task so easy that it was successfully performed by
three quarters of the fools on earth.
The failure as a painter was serious, but I had never had the least
interest in those qualities included in the term a good citizen. I knew
nothing about the government of the United States, and made no effort to
find out; as an abstraction it had reality for me, but as a reality no
substance. The priceless right of vote I neglected for whoever it was in
the Republican machine that regularly discharged that responsibility for
me. All that interested me, that I deeply cared for, was first the
disposal of paint on stretched canvas and then the arrangement of words
with a probable meaning and possible beauty.