corrupted by an attending hypocrisy which forced a fervent denial, the
pretense of an utterly different purpose, to be worn like a cloak. It
was possible that, admitted, the sovereignty of gold would be the most
beneficial rule applicable to man. It was preeminently the symbol, the
signature, of power; with the late sugar crops it had revolutionized
Cuba. Havana was for the moment, in a very strong sense, the capital of
the world, and the visible mark of that was the stream of automobiles on
the Prado and Malecon; individually, money was counted by the
million--the recognition, the desired reward, of the fact that Cuba
controlled a necessity of life. The instinct to profit by such turns of
fortune was deeper than any charitable impulse; there was a tendency to
speculate in wheat more general than the impulse to give loaves to the
starving.
There was a sudden surge toward the gang plank of the City of Miami, and
I was borne onto the steamer, away from Havana, in an exasperated and
bitter spirit. I had entered the harbor happily, saturated by its
beauty, but I was leaving blind to the marble walls on the blue water.
However, it was cooler on an upper deck; and with my back
uncompromisingly turned on humanity, on my fellow passengers over a sea
like a tranquil illusion of respite between stubborn realities, I picked
out from the panorama of the city across the harbor, diminishing in its
narrow entrance, familiar buildings and marks. Havana vanished, I
thought, far more rapidly than it had come into view; soon nothing of
Cuba could be seen but the dark green hills and thinly printed
silhouettes of mountains. I had it, though, in my memory; Havana was now
woven into the fibre of my being.
The Inglaterra Hotel took its place with all the remembered spots where
I had lived: the bare pine-sealed room in the Virginia mountains, the
tall narrow house in Geneva, the courtyard in the Via San Gallo, the
brick house in a suburb from which, in a rebellion against every
circumstance of my life, I had escaped. I recalled days on end when I
had tried to write without the ability to form a single acceptable
sentence, when the floor was heaped and littered with pages crushed and
flung away. Then, it had seemed, I should get nowhere, and see, do,
nothing.... Havana was a singularly lovely city. A rush of small
mementos of its life flooded my mind--the aroma of the cigars, the
coolness of the Telegrafo Cafe and the savor of its Daiquiri cocktails,
the burning strip of sunlight that, at noon, found its way into Obispo
Street. It was still possible to get Ron Bacardi in the United States. I
was carrying back a large provision of exceedingly fine cigars, not from
the Larranaga factory, but a slender Corona, a shape specially rolled
for a discrimination as delicate as any in Cuba. Yet, away from Havana,
they wouldn't taste the same; in the United States they'd deteriorate;
and, where I lived, there were no fresh, no emerald-green limes, and
without them a Daiquiri was robbed of its inimitable flavor.
But what, more than those, I should miss was the atmosphere of Havana
itself, the gay urbanity and festive lightness of tone. It had almost
wholly escaped the modern passion for reform changing America, pretty
much all the western world, into a desert of precept and correction; in
many senses Havana was an oasis in an aridity spreading day by day. Any
improvement wouldn't occur during my life--the habit of lies and
self-delusion had become a fundamental part of society--and all I could
hope for was the discovery of rare individuals and cities in which
existence was more than a penalty for having been born. I wanted them as
a relaxation, as short escapes from a tyranny from which, really, I was
powerless to turn:
I didn't want to live in Havana, nor to be surrounded by exceptional
people; for they were both enemies of what, above everything, I wanted
to do--to write into paper and ink some permanence of beauty. For that,
Chester County and the solid stone block of my house were necessary, a
temperate climate indispensable. At heart, in spite of my constant
fault-finding, my threats of leaving, I was bound by associations deeper
than mere intelligence. No, nothing so powerful as an obsession had
overtaken me approaching Havana; I was not, in actuality, an adventurer,
but only a seeker for charm, for memories, to carry back to the low
window to which I had already referred. The charm of Havana was its
strangeness, the vividness of its sudden impression on me, the temporary
freedom, grace, it offered. It was characteristic of freedom, too, that,
in the end, it became slavery; while slavery had, at times,
extraordinarily the appearance of freedom. Not a month ago I had
dropped, with a sigh, a gasp of relief, a pen heavier than anything else
on earth, and now I could scarcely restrain the eagerness--the
confidence, at last, of success--with which I wanted to take it up
again.
* * * * *
When I turned, looking back, Cuba had vanished, sunk below the line of
the sea. The Gulf Stream was indigo; along the side of the steamer, foam
hissed with a sharp whiteness, and at the bow miniature rainbows hung
shimmering in the spray. The perpetual soft clouds of the Gulf Stream
were very high and faint. In my imagination Havana assumed a magic, a
mythical, state--a vision that, I was certain, had no absolute
ponderable existence. It was a city created on a level bright tide,
under lustrous green hills, for the reward of cherished and unworldly
dreams. It was the etherealized spectacle of the sanguine hopes of all
the conquistadores who had set sail for the rubies of Cipango; they had
had great desires of white marble cities in which the women were lovely
and dark, and gold was worked into the forms of every day.
They, different from the frugal Dutch, making, with no less daring, the
Eastern Passage in the interest of associated merchants and of
commonwealths, sailed, in a more picturesque phrase, for their Catholic
Majesties and for Spain. The Dutch names, Bonteke and Schouten and
Roggeveen, had a solid bartering sound compared with Francesco de
Cordoba and Miruelo and Angel de Villafane. Holland had its deathless
tradition of the sea, sufficiently colored with extravagant adventure;
but its spirit was sober, the visions of its navigators would never have
lingered in a marble city.
Havana was, perhaps, a Saragossa of souls, with the acts and thoughts of
its early vivid years, of Carenas, forever held in the atmosphere,
audible in the restless volume of sound that was never still. Its
history had flashed through my mind with the turn of a wheel, its
duration seeming no more than the opening and shutting of a hand; but
now I had an impression not of the transient, not of walls and names and
voices, but of qualities impersonal and permanent, of something which,
while individual men died, resisted death. It had existence, that was,
as long as humanity drew a continuous thread of memory through time.
Havana had, outwardly, changed from its first huddle of bohios and
fortified tower; but the form it had taken, so different from the
discovered reality, had beyond any question that odd similitude to Marco
Polo's reports of the Grand Khanate. Its final architecture,
pseudo-classic, was more abstract than any other imaginable order: all
the dress that had ever paraded through the successive stages of the
city--the Cacquies, girdled in feathers, the brocades of Maria de Toledo
and her lady-in-waiting, Captain Godoy in steel and lace, the floating
crinoline of the Prince of Anglona's year, painted black nanigos--was
equally possible against a background at once fantastic and restrained.
There was never a more complex spirit than Havana's, no stranger
mingling of chance and climate and race had ever occurred; but,
remarkably, a unity of effect had been the result, such a singleness as
that possessed by an opera, in which, above the orchestra and the
settings and the voices, there was perceptible a transcending emotion
created from an artificial and illogical means. For while Havana had a
record dignified in its sweep, it could never be long dominant either
as a city or in its men; it had ruled an island but not the world, it
had never been--in that latitude--a Captain-general of a hemisphere. No,
it wasn't symphonic, but the lesser, more pictorial, performance; it
had, I thought, very much the appearance of a stage.
This, however was not a denial of the reality of the blood it shed, nor
of the sharpness and danger of its emotions; it had been a profusely
bloody city with tropical passions often reaching ideals of sacrifice.
It had, too, suffered the iron of oppression, spoken its word for
liberty, the state which, never to be realized, by its bare conception
elevated life. Now, in addition, it was a great port ... and yet, though
it might have been the fault of my limitations, I continued to see
Havana as more dramatic than essential; I heard persistently the
overture with the themes of Seville, the crying native airs, the drums
of Guinea played with the fingers. The shining crooked bay was filled by
the plate ships of Mexico and Peru, with their high-decked sterns and
yellow cannon. The curtain fell to rise again on Don Miguel Tacon!
It was impossible to determine what I had seen of Havana and what was
merely my reflected self; even hard to decide if I had seen Havana
objectively at all, since my attitude toward it had been so purely
personal. My memory was composed of what I'd experienced and the
reflections, the thoughts, that had given birth to; and, of them, the
latter were the more real, solider than the Prado, more tangible than
the dining-room of the Inglaterra. Without them Havana would have been
meaningless, sterile, simply a museum about which nothing could be
written but a catalogue. It was its special charm to be charged with
sensations rather than facts; a place where facts--not, of a kind,
absent--could be safely ignored. Further than that, ignoring them was,
for any measure of pleasure, absolutely needful: the pedantic spirit in
Havana was fatal.
What, almost entirely, I had been told to view, expected to enjoy, I had
avoided; yet not that, for it implied a deliberate will, and such a
planning or triumph of character had been as far as possible from my
drifting: I had seen what I preferred and done what I was; anyone,
following me in Havana, could have judged me with exactitude. I had
spent money lavishly--as though I were rich instead of extravagant--for
visible returns that would have only provoked the other passengers on
the City of Miami. They, where they were not driven to staterooms by the
dipping of the steamer, were vociferous with knowledge about Cuba, their
bags were heavy with souvenirs--the Coty perfumes from France and the
table-linen of the Canary Islands. The pervasive salesmen, flushed with
success and Scotch whisky, smoking the cigars long familiar to them in
northern hotels, hinted together of the Parisian girls and criollos, to
whom they referred as creoles in the meaning and vocabulary of American
burlesque. Some officials of transportation and sugar manipulators sat
aside, with double Coronas, exchanging in short sentences their hardness
of knowledge, speaking of Cuba as an estancia of which they were
absentee owners. A flight of winged fish skittered over the sea, and the
clouds following the Gulf Stream turned rose with the dropping of the
sun; the horizon bore a suggestion of Florida. Once Cuba, regarded as
the shore of India, had been the center of the West, and Florida no more
than a chimera: how ironic such errors and reversals were! Now it was
Juana that was legendary, and Florida resembled the significant hooked
finger of an imponderable power. The day slid rapidly into water that
had lost its blueness for expanses of chalky shallow green, and the flat
roofs of Key West and masoned arches became slowly visible across the
sea, and a stir of departure filled the decks.
I was, for a moment, depressed at the definite leaving behind of
Havana--for the tranquil passage had seemed only an extension of its
spirit--and by the imminent reshouldering of my burden of
responsibility. I had never wanted that, but, without choice, it had
been abruptly thrust on me--a responsibility, impossible of fulfilment,
which I couldn't put down. When I was young I had looked in vain for a
perpetual Havana, hoping for nothing more; and now, when my youth was
dead, I had found the perfection of my desire. But, as always, the
discovery was too late; I couldn't stay in the covered paseos, the
plazas with flambeau trees and royal palms or idle in a room of Moorish
tiles with a dripping fountain, over a magic drink; my time for the
actualities of charming liberty, the possession of uncounted days, was
gone. But this mood was nothing more than a gesture, a sentiment, thrown
back to romance.
[Illustration: image of the book's back cover]
The following typographical errors were corrected by the etext
transcriber:
beginninng of the Prado=>beginning of the Prado
like a harsh native wine, from Balbao=>like a harsh native wine, from
Bilbao
End of Project Gutenberg's San Cristobal de la Habana, by Joseph Hergesheimer