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+Project Gutenberg's San Cristóbal de la Habana, by Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: San Cristóbal de la Habana
+
+Author: Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+Release Date: December 30, 2011 [EBook #38445]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA HABANA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: image of the book's cover]
+
+
+
+SAN CRISTÓBAL
+DE LA HABANA
+
+_THE WORKS OF
+JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER_
+
+_NOVELS_
+
+THE LAY ANTHONY [1914]
+MOUNTAIN BLOOD [1915]
+THE THREE BLACK PENNYS [1917]
+JAVA HEAD [1918]
+LINDA CONDON [1919]
+
+SHORTER STORIES
+
+GOLD AND IRON [1918]
+THE HAPPY END [1919]
+
+TRAVEL
+
+SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA HABANA
+
+_Published in New York by
+ALFRED A. KNOPF
+and for sale at all bookshops_
+
+
+
+
+SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA HABANA
+
+BY
+
+JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
+
+    "_Many yeeres since I had knowledge by
+    relation of that great and golden Citie
+    which the Spaniards call El Dorado._"
+
+    _Sir Walter Ralegh_
+
+[Illustration: colophon]
+
+NEW YORK
+
+ALFRED A KNOPF
+
+1920
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
+ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+        _To
+
+     H. J. B. BAIRD
+
+          An
+        Havana
+    which he is free
+to decline in every particular
+       save the
+     dedication_
+
+
+
+
+SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA HABANA
+
+
+There are certain cities, strange to the first view, nearer the heart
+than home. But it might be better to acknowledge that, perhaps, the word
+home has a wider and deeper significance than any mere geographical and
+family setting. Many men are alien in houses built from the traditions
+of their blood; the most inaccessible and obdurate parts of the earth
+have always been restlessly sought by individuals driven not so much by
+exterior pressure as by a strange necessity to inhabit a barren copper
+mountain, a fever coast, or follow to the end of life a river lost in a
+savage remoteness, hiding the secret of their unquenchable longing.
+
+Not this, precisely, happened to me, approaching Havana in the early
+morning, nothing so tyrannical and absolute; yet, watching the silver
+greenness of Cuba rising from the blue sea, I had a premonition that
+what I saw was of peculiar importance to me. I grew at once impatient
+and sharply intent on the resolving of a nebulous, and verdant mass into
+the details of dense slopes, slopes that showed, from the sea to their
+crowns, no break in a dark foliage. The sombreness of the leaves
+immediately marked the land from an accustomed region of bright
+maples--they were at once dark, glossy, and heavy, an effect I had often
+tried to describe, and their presence in such utter expanses filled me
+with pleasure. It was exactly as though the smooth lustrous hills before
+me had been created out of an old mysterious desire to realize them in
+words.
+
+Undoubtedly their effect belonged to the sea, the sky, and the hour in
+which they were set. The plane of the sea, ruffled by a wind like a
+willful and contrarily exerted force, was so blue that its color was
+lost in the dark intensity of tone; while the veils of space were
+dissolved in arcs of expanding light. The island seemed unusually solid
+and isolated, as complete within itself as a flower in air, and
+saturated with romance. That was my immediate feeling about Cuba, taking
+on depth across water profounder than indigo ... it was latent with the
+emotional distinction which so signally stirred me to write.
+
+At once, in imagination, I saw the ineffable bay of Guatanago, where
+buccaneers careened their ships and, in a town of pink stucco and
+windows with projecting wooden grilles, drank and took for figureheads
+the sacred images of churches painted blue. On the shore, under a canopy
+of silk, a woman, naked but for a twist of bishop's purple, bound her
+hair in gold cloth. From where she stood, in dyed shadow, a figure only
+less golden than the cloth, she heard the hollow ring of the caulking
+malls and the harsh rustle of the palms. Drawing rapidly nearer to what
+was evidently the entrance to the harbor of Havana I considered the
+possibilities of such a story, such a character:
+
+She had her existence in the seventeenth century, when Morgan marched
+inland to rape Camagüey--the daughter, without doubt, of a captain of
+the Armada de Barlevento, the Windward Fleet, and a native woman taken
+in violence; a shameless wench with primitive feelings enormously
+complicated by the heritage of Spain's civilization, a murderous,
+sullen, passionate jade, wholly treacherous and instinct with ferine
+curiosity. The master for her, I decided, must come from the Court of
+Charles, the London of the Cavalier Parliament, a gentleman in a gay
+foppery masking a steel eaten by a cruelty like a secret poison. It
+would be a story bright with the flames of hell and violent as a
+hurricane; the pages would reflect the glare of the sand scrawled with
+cocoanut palms, and banked with mangroves; and, at the end, the bishop's
+purple would be a cerecloth and the gallows chains sound in Xaymaca.
+But, above everything else, it would be modern in psychology and color
+treatment, written with that realism for which the only excuse was to
+provide a more exact verisimilitude for romance.
+
+The Cuban shore was now so close, Havana so imminent, that I lost my
+story in a new interest. I could see low against the water a line of
+white buildings, at that distance purely classic in implication. Then it
+was that I had my first premonition about the city toward which I was
+smoothly progressing--I was to find in it the classic spirit not of
+Greece but of a late period; it was the replica of those imagined cities
+painted and engraved in a wealth of marble cornices and set directly
+against the tranquil sea. There was already perceptible about it the air
+of unreality that marked the strand which saw the Embarkation for
+Cytherea.
+
+Nothing could have made me happier than this realization; an extension
+of the impression of a haunting dream turned into solid fact. The
+buildings multiplied to the sight, bathed in a glamorous radiance; and,
+suddenly, on the other hand, rose Morro Castle. That structure, small
+and compact and remarkably like its numerous pictures, gave me a
+distinct feeling of disappointment. Its importance was historic rather
+than visible, and needed, for appreciation, a different mind from mine.
+But the narrowness of the harbor entrance, a deep thrust of blue
+extending crookedly into the land, the sense of crowded shipping and
+massed city, the steamers of the world and broad shaded avenues at my
+elbow, impressed me at once with Havana's unique personality.
+
+Nothing, however, was more ingratiating than the long coraline limestone
+wall of the Cabañas on its sere abrupt hill at the left; ponderous and
+stained brilliantly pink by time, it formed a miraculous complement to
+the pseudo-classic whiteness below. A sea-wall built into a wide
+promenade followed the shore, there was a circular pavilion on a flagged
+plaza piled with iron chairs, the docks were interspersed with small
+public gardens under royal palms, and everywhere the high windows had
+ornamental balconies empty in the morning sun. I heard, then, the voice
+of Havana, a remarkably active staccato voice, never, I was to learn,
+sinking to quiet, but changing at night into a different yet no less
+disturbing clamor.
+
+What I tried to discover, rushed through broad avenues and streets
+hardly more than passageways, was the special characteristic of a city
+which had already possessed me. And, ignorant of the instantaneous
+process that formed the words, I told myself that it was a mid-Victorian
+Pompeii. This was a modification of my first impression, a truer
+approximation, for it expressed the totality of marble façades
+inadmissible architecturally, yet together holding a surprising and
+pleasant unity. No one, I thought excitedly, had ever rightly
+appreciated Havana; it required a very involved understanding, a feeling
+not entirely admirable. No, it wasn't Hellenic, not what might be called
+in the first manner; it hadn't the simplicity of great spirit, a true
+epoch; Havana was artificial, exotic: Spain touched everywhere by the
+tropics, the tropics--without a tradition--built into a semblance of the
+baroque.
+
+It was rococo, and I liked it; an admission, I believe, laying me open
+to certain charges; for the rococo was universally damned; the Victorian
+period had been equally condemned ... and I liked it. Why, God knew!
+Ornament without use, without reference to its surface and purpose,
+invited contempt. A woman in a hoop skirt was an absurdity; black walnut
+furniture carved and gilded beyond recognition, nonsense. Yet they had
+my warm attachment. Havana claimed me for its own--a city where I could
+sit at tables in the open and gaze at parterres of flowers and palms and
+statues and fountains, where, in the evening, a band played the light
+arias of La Belle Hélène.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To illustrate further the perversity of my impulses: I was so entirely
+captivated by the Hotel Inglaterra that, for the rest of the day, I was
+indifferent to whatever might be waiting outside. The deep entrance with
+its reflected planes of subdued light and servants in cool linen; the
+patio with water, its white arches on iridescent tiles; the dining-room
+laid in marble, panelled with the arms of Pontius Pilate, the bronze
+lustre of the tiling and the long windows on the Parque exactly as I had
+anticipated, together created the happy effect of a bizarre domain. The
+corridor on which my room opened was still more entrancing, its arches
+filled with green latticework, and an octagonal space set with chairs
+and long-bladed plants.
+
+Yet the room itself, perhaps one of the most remarkable rooms in the
+world, easily surpassed what, until then, I had seen. There were slatted
+door screens, cream-colored with a sapphire-blue glass knob, topped in
+an elaborate Gothic scrolling; and the door beyond, inconceivably tall,
+opened on an interior that seemed to reach upward without any limit. It
+had, of course, a ceiling, heavily beamed in dark wood; and when, later,
+I speculated carefully on its height, I reached the conclusion that it
+was twenty-five feet above the grey-flowered tiling of the floor. The
+walls were bare, white; about their base was laid a line of green glazed
+tiles; and this, except for the glass above the French window, was the
+only positive note.
+
+The window, too, towered with the dignity of an impressive entrance;
+there were two sets of shutters, the inner elaborately slatted; and over
+it was a semi-circular fanlight of intensely brilliant colors--carmine
+and orange and plum-purple, cobalt and yellow. It was extraordinarily
+vivid, like heaped gorgeous fruit: throughout the day it dominated the
+closed elusive interior; and not only from its place on high, for the
+sun, moving across that exposure, cast its exact replica on the floor,
+over the frigidity of the austere iron bed, down one wall and up
+another.
+
+It was fascinating merely to sit and watch that chromatic splash, the
+violent color, shift with the afternoon, to surrender the mind to its
+suggestions.... They, as well, were singularly bright and illogical.
+Such glass, such colors, had been discarded from present decorative
+schemes; but I recalled hints of them in the houses of eighteen seventy;
+I seemed to remember them in pagoda-like conservatories, and at once a
+memory of my childhood returned. Not that there were, actually, such
+windows at Woodnest, sombre under the tulip-poplars; yet the impression
+of one re-created the feeling of the other, it brought back disturbingly
+a vanished time with its figures long dead.
+
+Havana was identified as an authentic part of my inheritance. I was--in
+a purely inner manner--to understand it, to have for it the affectionate
+recognition, the sense of familiarity, of which I have already spoken.
+The city was wholly expressed by the fanlight sparkling with the
+shifting radiance of the blazing day. It was possible, without leaving
+the room, to grasp the essential spirit of a place so largely unseen.
+Then it occurred to me that, indeed, I had seen Havana, and that the
+wisest thing to do was to leave at once, to go back with my strong
+feeling uncontaminated by trivial facts; but a more commonplace impulse,
+a limiting materialism, pointed out that, since I had come away for a
+change of scene, I had best realize a semblance of my intention. Still
+those colors, like a bouquet of translucent tulips, easily outweighed in
+importance all that I subsequently gained; they gave the emotional
+pitch, the intellectual note, of whatever followed--a mood, an entire
+existence, into which I walked with the turning of a sapphire-blue knob.
+
+For the rest the furniture was scant--a walnut bureau with a long
+mirror, necessary chairs, and an adequate bathroom like a shaft with
+shining silver faucets at its bottom. From outside, even through the
+heat of noon, the sustained activity of sound floated up through the
+shutters--the incomplete blending of harsh traffic alarms and blurred
+cries announcing newspapers.
+
+It was later when I went out on my balcony: across the narrow depth of
+San Rafael Street the ornamented bulk of the Gallego Club--the Club and
+the opera house in one--opposed a corner against the sweep of the Parque
+Central; and to the right, between the glitter of shop windows, poured
+an unbroken procession of motors. A great pillar of the paseo below was
+hung with gaily covered magazines; a bootblack, wrinkled and active,
+with a single chair on a high stand, was cleaning a row of white shoes,
+obviously from the hotel; and the newsboys were calling La Politica
+Comica in a long-drawn minor inflection.
+
+The sun, that I had seen rising on the undiscovered hills of Cuba, was
+sinking behind the apprehended city; it touched the caryatids of the
+Gallego Club and enveloped, in a diminished gold like a fine suffusion
+of precious dust, the circular avenue, the royal palms, the flambeau
+trees and Indian laurels, of the plaza. The whiteness of the buildings,
+practically unbroken, everywhere took on the tone of every moment: now
+they were faintly aureate, as though they had been lightly touched by a
+gilder's brush; the diffused shadows were violet. The shadows slowly
+thickened and merged; they seemed to swell upward from the streets, the
+Parque; and the buildings, in turn, became lavender, and then, again, a
+glimmering white. Only the lifted green of the palms was changeless,
+positive, until it was lost in darkness.
+
+A great many people appeared below, moving with an air of determination
+on definite ways. The faces of the men were darkened by the contrast of
+their linen; I couldn't see their features; but what struck me at once
+was the fact that there were, practically, no women along the streets.
+It was a tide of men. This, at first, gave me an impression of monotony,
+of stupidity--women were an absolute essential to the variety of any
+spectacle; and here, except for an occasional family group hurrying to a
+café, a rare stolid shape, they were utterly lacking.
+
+The reason, however, quickly followed the observed truth; this was, in
+spirit, Spain, and Spain was saturated with Morocco, a land where women,
+even the poorest, were never publicly exhibited. Havana was a city of
+balconies, of barred windows, of houses impenetrable, blank, to the
+streets, but open on the garden rooms of patios. And suddenly--while the
+moment before I had been impatient at the bareness resulting from their
+absence--I was overwhelmingly conscious of the pervading influence of
+charming women. Here they were infinitely more appealing than in places
+where they were set out in the rows of a market, sometimes like flowers,
+but more often resembling turnips and squashes. Here, with extreme
+flattery, women were regarded as dangerous, as always desirable, and
+capable of folly.
+
+It was a society where a camellia caught in the hair, a brilliant glance
+across a powdered cheek, lace drawn over a vivid mouth, were not for
+nothing. In the world from which I had come these gestures, beauties,
+existed; but they were general, and meaningless, rather than
+special--the expression of a conventional vanity without warmth. There
+was an agreement that any one might look, the intensest gaze was
+invited, with the understanding that almost none should desire; and a
+cloak of hypocrisy had been the result; either that or the beauty was
+mechanical, the gesture furtive and hard.
+
+For Havana a woman was, in principle, a flower with delicate petals
+easily scattered, a perfume not to be rudely, indiscriminately, spent; a
+rose, it was the implication, had its moment, its perfection of eager
+flushed loveliness, during which what man would not reach out his hand?
+After that ... but the seed pods were carefully, jealously, tended. And
+here, in addition to so much else, was another shared attitude drawing
+me toward Havana--an enormous preference for women who had the courage
+of their emotions over those completely circumspect except in situations
+morally and financially solid.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My dressing for dinner I delayed luxuriously, smoking the last Dimitrino
+cigarette found in a pocket, and leaving the wet prints of my feet on
+the polished tiles of the floor. I was glad that I had brought a trunk,
+variously filled, in place of merely a bag, as I might have done; for it
+was evident that Havana required many changes of clothes. It was a city
+which to enjoy demanded a meticulous attention to trifles. For one thing
+it was going to be hot, April was well advanced; and the glorietas, the
+brightly illuminated open cafés, the thronged Prado and operatic
+Malecón, the general air of tropical expensiveness, insisted on the
+ornamental fitness of its idlers.
+
+I debated comfortably the security of a dinner coat, slightly varied,
+perhaps, by white flannels; but in the end decided in favor of a more
+informal jacket of Chinese silk with the flannels. A shirt, the socks
+and scarf, were objects of separate importance; but when they were
+combined there was a prevailing shade of green.... I had no inclination
+to apologize for lingering over these details, but it might be necessary
+to warn the seekers after noble truisms that I had no part in their
+righteous purpose. Even noble truths, in their popular definitions, had
+never been a part of my concern: at the beginning I was hopelessly
+removed from them, and what was an instinct had become, in an experience
+of life not without supporting evidence, the firmest possible attitude.
+A tone of candor, if my reflections were to have the slightest interest
+or value, was my first necessity; and candor compelled me to admit that
+I thought seriously about the jacket which finally slipped smoothly over
+my shoulders.
+
+It was an undeniable fact that I was newly in a land of enormous
+interest, which, just then, held the most significant and valuable crop
+growing on earth. But that didn't detain my imagination for a moment.
+The Havana that delighted me, into which I found myself so happily
+projected, was a city of promenading and posted theatre programmes, of
+dinners and drinks and fragrant cigars. I was aware that from such
+things I might, in the end, profit; but I'd get nothing, nothing in the
+world, from stereotyped sentiments and places and solemn gabbled
+information.
+
+On top of this I had a fixed belief in the actual importance of, say, a
+necktie--for myself of course; I was not referring to the neckties of
+the novelists with a mission, lost in the dilemma of elevating mankind.
+A black string, or none at all, served their superiority. But for the
+light-minded the claim of a Bombay foulard against the solider shade of
+an Irish poplin was a delicate question; for the light-minded the choice
+of one word in preference to another--entirely beneath the plane of a
+mission--was a business for blood, an overt act. And with me there was a
+correspondence between the two, a personal exterior as nicely selected
+as possible and the mental attitude capable of exquisite choice in
+diction. But this was no more than a development of all that I first
+admitted, a repetition of my pleasure at being in Havana, a place where
+the election of a cocktail was invested with gravity. And, carefully
+finished except for the flower I'd get below, I was entirely in harmony
+with the envelopment, the adventure, to which my persistent good luck
+had brought me.
+
+The elevator going down was burdened with expensive women, their bodies
+delicately evident under clinging fragile materials, their powdered
+throats hung with the clotted iridescence of pearls; the cage was filled
+with soft breathing and faint provocative perfumes--the special lure of
+flowers which nature had denied to them as women. It was, I told myself,
+all very reprehensible and delightful:
+
+Here were creatures, anatomically planned for the sole end of maternity,
+who had wilfully, wisely I felt, elevated the mere preliminary of their
+purpose to the position of its whole consummation. More intoxicated by
+sheer charm than by the bearing of children, resentful of the thickened
+ankles of their immemorial duty, they proclaimed by every enhanced and
+seductive curve that their intention was magnetic rather than economic.
+They were, however, women of my own land, secure in that convention
+which permitted them exposure with immunity, and here; in Havana, they
+failed to interest me; their voices, too, were sharp, irritable; and
+even in the contracted space of the elevator their elaborate backs were
+so brutally turned on the men with them--men correct enough except for
+their studs--the hard feminine tyranny of the chivalrous United States
+was so starkly upheld, that I escaped with a sigh of relief into a
+totally different atmosphere.
+
+The lower hall, the patio and dining-room on the left, were brilliant
+with life, the wing-like flutter of fans; and it would be necessary, I
+saw, to have my cocktail in the patio; but before that, following a
+purely instinctive course, I walked out to the paseo in front of the
+hotel. The white buildings beyond the dark foliage of the Parque were
+coruscant with electric signs, and, their utilitarian purpose masked in
+an unfamiliar language, they shared with the alabaster of the façades,
+the high fronds of the royal palms and the monument to Marti, in the
+tropical, the classic, romanticism.
+
+Hardly had I appeared, gazing down the illuminated arcade, when a man
+approached me with a flat wide basket of flowers. There were,
+inevitably, roses, tea roses as pale as the yellow of champagne,
+gardenias, so smooth and white that they seemed unreal, heavy with
+odor; those I had expected, but what surprised me were some sprigs of
+orange blossom with an indefinite sweetness that was yet perceptible
+above the thicker scents. I chose the latter immediately, and the flower
+vendor, wholly comprehensive of my mood, placed the boutonnière in my
+jacket. The moment, now, had arrived for a Daiquiri: seated near the
+cool drip of the fountain, where a slight stir of air seemed to ruffle
+the fringed mantone of a bronze dancing Andalusian girl, I lingered over
+the frigid mixture of Ron Bacardi, sugar, and a fresh vivid green lime.
+
+It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was to discover later at
+the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be
+sitting, at that hour in the Inglaterra, with such a drink. It elevated
+my contentment to an even higher pitch; and, with a detached amusement,
+I recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was formally in
+effect. Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent,
+for it held, in its shallow glass bowl slightly encrusted with
+undissolved sugar, the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it
+set the mind free of responsibility; obliterating both memory and
+to-morrow, it gave the heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and
+momentarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal, fears.
+
+Yes, that was the danger of skilfully prepared intoxicating drinks....
+The word intoxicating adequately expressed their power, their menace to
+orderly monotonous resignation. A word, I thought further, debased by
+moralists from its primary ecstatic content. Intoxication with Ron
+Bacardi, with May, with passion, was a state threatening to privilege,
+abhorrent to authority. And, since the dull were so fatally in the
+majority, they had succeeded in attaching a heavy penalty to whatever
+lay outside their lymphatic understanding. They had, as well, made the
+term gay an accusation before their Lord, confounding it with loose, so
+that now a gay girl--certainly the only girl worth a ribbon or the last
+devotion--was one bearing upon her graceful figure, for she was apt to
+be reprehensibly graceful, the censure of a society open to any charge
+other than that of gaiety in either of its meanings. A ridiculous, a
+tragic, conclusion, I told myself indifferently: but then, with a fresh
+Daiquiri and a sprig of orange blossoms in my buttonhole, it meant less
+than nothing. It grew cooler, and an augmented stir set in motion toward
+the dining-room, where the files of damask-spread tables held polished
+silver water-bottles and sugar in crystal jars with spouts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wisdom of the attention I had given to my appearance was at once
+evident in the table to which the head waiter conducted me. Small and
+reserved with a canted chair, it was directly at one of the long windows
+on the Parque Central. This, at first sight, on the part of its arbiter,
+would not have been merely an affair for money--he had his eye on the
+effect of the dining-room as a whole, as an expanse of the utmost
+decorative correctness, and there were a number of men with quite
+pretty women, a great asset publicly, who had been given places in the
+center of the room. Yes, where I was seated the ruffled curtains were
+swayed by the night breeze almost against my chair, a brilliant section
+of the plaza was directly at my shoulder, and I was pervaded by the
+essential feeling of having the best possible situation.
+
+This was not, perhaps, true of characters more admirable than mine: but
+if I had been seated behind one of the pillars, buried in an obscure
+angle, my spirits would have suffered a sharp decline. I should have
+thought, temporarily, less of Havana, of myself, and of the world. The
+passionate interest in living, the sense of æsthetic security, that
+resulted in my turning continually to the inconceivable slavery of
+writing, would have been absent. But seated in one of the most desirable
+spots in existence, a dining-room of copper glazed tiles open on the
+tropics, about to begin a dinner with shrimps in the pink--the veritable
+rose--of perfection, while a head waiter, a triumph of intelligent
+sympathy, conferred with me on the delicate subject of wines, I felt
+equal to prose of matchless loveliness.
+
+The dinner, finally, as good dinners were apt to be, was small, simple,
+with--the result of a prolonged consideration--a bottle of Marquis de
+Riscal. All the while the kaleidoscope of the Parque was revolving in
+patterns of bright yellows, silver, and indigo. Passersby were
+remarkably graphic and near: a short man with a severe expression and a
+thick grey beard suddenly appeared in the open window and demanded that
+I buy a whole lottery ticket; a sallow individual from without unfolded
+a bright glazed sheaf of unspeakably stupid American magazines; farther
+off, the crowd eddied through the lanes between the innumerable chairs
+drawn up companionably on the plaza. At a table close by, a family of
+Cubans were supplementing the courses of formal dining with an endless
+vivacious chatter, a warmth of interest charming to follow.
+
+The father, stout, with an impressive moustache of which not one hair
+seemed uncounted or mislaid, regarded his short fat wife, his tall slim
+son, and his two entrancing daughters with an impartially active and
+affectionate attention. The girls were young, one perhaps fifteen and
+the other not more than a year or so older, though they both managed
+lorgnons with an ease and impertinent frankness that an older woman
+might well have envied, while they talked in rushes of vivid Spanish
+with an emphases of delectable shrugged shoulders, and, recognizing an
+acquaintance, exhibited smiles as dazzling as only youth knew. The boy,
+however, engaged me more strongly; a tone darker than the others, in
+repose his face, delicate in feature, was grave, reflective; his smooth
+black hair grew into a peak on his brow, his gaze was considerate,
+direct, and his mouth sensitive. Cuba, I thought, at its best; and here
+that was very good indeed. Any such degree of mingled dignity and the
+highly impressionable, of reserve and flexibility, was absent from the
+cruder young of the north.
+
+He had, at the same time, an indefinable air of melancholy, a bearing
+that, while not devoid of pride, belonged to a minor people, to an
+island the ultimate fate of which--in a political word of singular
+faithlessness--was hidden in shadow. An affair of mere simple courage,
+of execution for an ideal by Spanish rifles in a Cabañas foss, he would
+have borne with brilliant success; he'd have ornamented charmingly the
+security of a great coffee estate in Pinar del Rio; it was possible that
+he might be distinguished in finance; but there was not back of him the
+sense of sheer weight, of ponderous land, that gave, for example, the
+chance young Englishman his conscious security, the American his
+slightly shrill material confidence.
+
+This Cuban's particular quality, it seemed to me, belonged to the past,
+to an age when men wore jewelled buckles and aristocracy was an
+advantage rather than a misfortune. He had about him the graceful
+fatality now so bitterly attacked by the widening power of what was
+heroically referred to as the people. He represented, from the crown of
+his lustrous hair to his narrow correct dancing shoes, in his shapely
+hands and dark fine skin, privilege and sequestered gold. Outrages, I
+had heard, soon to be forever overthrown! It was possible that both the
+charges and the threatened remedy were actualities, and that privilege
+would disappear ... from one hand to another, and great lawns be cut up
+into cabbage patches and Empire ball-rooms converted into communal halls
+for village rancor.
+
+Not much, in the way of benefit, could follow that. And women in
+starched linen collars, with starched theories of civic consciousness,
+would hardly be an improvement on fragrant memories of satin, moments of
+passion and frailty, and the beauty of tenderness. A maze of clipped
+box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority,
+for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and
+their destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was
+immeasurably disastrous. All of this I saw reflected in the boy with
+peaked hair at the next table. He took a cigarette from a black silk
+case, and I was immediately reminded of my cigar.
+
+It had been chosen with immense care in the Inglaterra café for bonbons
+and souvenirs, liqueurs and cigars. How remarkable it was, I had
+thought, hovering above the case, which contained a bewildering choice
+of shapes and colors, to be in a land where all the cigars were, in the
+sense I knew, imported. I hesitated for a minute or more between a
+Larrañaga and a banquet Corona, and finally decided on the former. It
+was as long as the cigar called Fancy Tales, but slightly thicker and
+rolled to a point at either end; and the first breath of its smoke,
+drifting in a blue cloud away from the window, told me that until then I
+had known but little of tobacco. Coffee so black that it stained the
+white shell of its cup; a diminutive glass of Grand Marnier, the
+distilled last saturation of oranges and fin champagne; and the
+Larrañaga, the color of oak leaves freshly brown, combined in a
+transcending magic of contentment.
+
+The point was--my special inhibition as a traveler--that I didn't want
+to move; I had no wish to speak to anyone or see what, particularly, I
+should have hurried away to view. That impatience I had served when I
+was twenty-one, in Naples; a city uniquely planned for morbid and
+natural curiosity. There the animated frescoes of Pompeii had been
+posed, at two lire a figure, before my assumption of mature experience.
+But now, past forty, I was without the ambition and desire to follow the
+cabs of the American business men who, in the company of patient and
+fatigued Cubans, were, in the interest of vague appointments, bidding
+their families elaborate good evenings.
+
+Later it was inevitable that I should get to the theatres, hear whatever
+music offered, and see all the dancing, Spanish and Cuban, in the city
+of Havana, but not to-night. My present pleasure was not to be wasted in
+the bother of movement and a probable mistake. The cigar continued to
+veil me in its reflective smoke for another half hour, there was more
+coffee in the pot. The tempered heat of the day lay over me like a
+spell, like an armor against the chill, the gaunt winds and rain, of the
+north. The scent of the sprig of orange blossoms was just perceptible,
+at once faint and laden with the potency of a magical grove.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The weather, the temperature and special atmospheric envelopment of
+Havana, was, I was certain, different from any other, its heat modified
+by the winds that moved across the island at night, at least from this
+shore, and the days flooded with an incandescent sunlight like burning
+magnesium. Stirring slowly about my room before breakfast, the slatted
+shutters bowed against the already blazing day, a thread of cigarette
+smoke climbing hopelessly toward the far ceiling, I thought of the
+idiotic popular conviction that the weather was a topic for stupid
+minds. The reverse, certainly, was true, since, inbound with all the
+settings of life, all nature, the weather offered an illimitable range
+of suggestion.
+
+It had been the great discovery of imaginative prose--the novel for
+which we care most had been largely the result of that gained
+appreciation; and its absence in older books, placed in a vacuum,
+entirely accounted for their dry unreality. What, for instance, were the
+novels of Thomas Hardy but splendid records of the countryside weather,
+for nature and weather were one. This, more than any other force,
+conditioned men, stamping them out with an ice age, burning them black
+in Africa ... setting royal palms by the doors of the Hotel Inglaterra
+and willows along my lower lawn.
+
+The difference between Havana and West Chester was exactly that
+difference in their foliage, in the low April green of one and the harsh
+high fronds of the other. The quality, the weather, that made the trees
+made equally the men, just as it dictated their lives, the houses they
+lived in, their industries and planted grains. This was true not only
+of the country but of the city, too, of George Moore as well as Hardy;
+for though Moore belonged principally to salons and the discreet
+interiors of broughams, a good half of the beauty of his pages was due
+to his response to the quality of spring against a smoke-blackened
+London wall, the laburnum blossoming in his Dublin garden.
+
+The slightest impression of Havana must be founded on a sensitive
+recognition of the crystal light and printed shadows which, in addition
+to its architecture of fact, brought another of sweeping illusion. In
+the morning the plazas glittered in a complete revelation of every hard
+carving and leaf and painted kiosk, but later the detail merged in airy
+diagonal structures of shade. Modified, infrequently, by the gorgeous
+cumulous clouds drifting from the upward thrust, the anchorage, of the
+Andes, the entire process of the hours was upset. This was not simply a
+variation of inanimate surface, it had an exact counterpart in the
+emotions: bowed by an insuperable blaze or upright in the veiled sun,
+the attitude of harmony was profoundly affected. The night was
+altogether separate, a time, I gathered, when it seldom rained; and
+there was never another city that took advantage of the night like
+Havana. Released from the resplendent tyranny of the sun, everyone, it
+appeared, disdaining sleep, lingered in the plazas, the cafés, and along
+the sea-walls, until dawn threatened. Here the dark was not alone a
+stage for nocturnal plans and figures: it was without strangeness or
+fear for the Cubans thronging abroad, on foot and in motors, early and
+late. The whiteness of the buildings, too, even where they were not
+illuminated, defined spaces never obscure; the city was never wholly
+lost, obliterated by the imponderable blackness of the north. All this,
+every aspect of Havana's being, was the gift--the dangerous gift--of its
+situation, its weather. The blinding day, the city folded in a sparkling
+night, like a vision in blanched satin with fireflies in her hair, were
+nothing more than meteorological.
+
+For myself, my entire attitude was different in the room I now inhabited
+from the inherent feeling, in New York, of the Algonquin. I was, in
+white flannels and brown Holland, with roses against the mirror of the
+bureau, another man; not only my mentality but my physical bearing was
+changed. Here I was an individual who, moving about for an hour or so in
+the morning, spent the day until late afternoon in some quiet and cool
+inner spaciousness. That, I appreciated at once, was one of the
+comfortable peculiarities of Havana: it was always possible to be
+cool--in a café with the marble floor sprinkled with water; at the
+entrance of the Inglaterra, where, however, the chairs were the most
+uncomfortable in the world; or, better yet, with a book, a naranjada,
+and pajamas, transiently at home.
+
+For the iced refrescos of Cuba I had been prepared; and at breakfast,
+though that, I found later, was not its hour, I chose, rather than a
+naranjada, a piña colado--a glass, nearly as large and quite as thin as
+possible, of the chilled essence of pineapple. A remarkable, a
+delightful, concoction. Later I heard the refrescos referred to
+contemptuously by Americans whose attitude toward the Cubans paralleled
+their opinion of the local drinks. They elected whiskey, at times
+condescending to gin, and the effect was portentous. Some sat near me
+now, with breakfasts of bubbling ham and crisped eggs, lamenting the
+coffee.
+
+It was doubtless part of the hypnotism of my liking for Havana that
+reconciled me to the coffee, poured simultaneously with hot salted milk
+into the cup. I accepted it at once, together with a cut French roll
+ingeniously buttered. Other efforts were made, through a window, to sell
+a wallpaper of lottery tickets; the vendor of magazines now put forward
+the Havana Post, printed in English; the curtains hung motionless, a
+transparent film on the bright space beyond.
+
+There was nothing I had to do, or see, no duty to myself to fulfill;
+and, watching the stir of tourist departure, I was thankful for my
+total lack of uncomfortable incentive. I had, for instance, no intention
+of ascending the height of Morro Castle, which--I had hardly needed the
+assurance--included a fatiguing number of stairs; nor of becoming
+familiar with Cabañas fortress. It had been quite enough to see in
+passing that long pink wall and know that there were old batteries of
+cannon embossed with the sovereign names of Spain. There were no picture
+galleries; and in Havana the churches were rich in neither tradition nor
+beauty, and the convents of early days had been turned into warehouses.
+It was, on the whole, a city without obtrusive history; even its first
+site was on the other side of the island; the wall, except for a
+fragment or two, had gone; its early aspects were practically absorbed
+by the later spirit that had captivated me. Here, if ever, was a place
+in which honesty of mood could be completely indulged.
+
+A state not innocent of danger to the Puritan tradition--lately
+assaulted with useless vigor--of suppression; for to the Latin
+acceptance of the whole of life had been added the passions of the
+tropics. Cuba had cynically realized this, and multiplied a natural
+frankness with a specialized attention to the northern masculinity I had
+seen leaving the hotel at odd hours last night. I felt even so soon,
+with prohibition a reality, that our national prudery was a very
+unfortunate influence indeed in Havana. The season was at an end--only a
+few days of the racing remained--so I had missed the obvious worst; but
+traces of the corruption of the dull, the dull themselves in diminishing
+numbers, lingered.
+
+Havana, in common with other foreign countries, and with so many golden
+reasons to the contrary, had no general liking for Americans. The few
+who had understood Cuba, either living there or journeying with
+discretion, were most warmly appreciated; and, characteristically, it
+was they more than the natives who were principally disconcerted by the
+released waggishness of Maine and Ohio and Illinois. But the majority
+were merely exploited. There was, certainly, something on the other side
+of the fence, for the Cubans were morbidly sensitive about their land,
+their monuments and martyrs, not necessarily impressive to the
+Anglo-Saxon heritage and temperament. There were fundamental racial
+differences, with a preponderant ultimate weight in favor of continents
+as opposed to islands. The fascination Havana had for me wasn't
+inevitable; I was only considering with regret, æsthetic rather than
+moral, the effect on Cuba of any prostitution.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As, in a temporary stoppage of its circular traffic, I walked across the
+Parque Central, its limits seemed to extend indefinitely, as if it had
+become a Sahara of pavement exposed to the white core of the sun; and I
+passed with a feeling of immense relief into the shade of a book-shop at
+the head of Obispo Street, where the intolerable glare slowly faded from
+my vision as I fingered the heaps of volumes paper-bound in a variegated
+brightness of color and design. In any book-shop I was entirely at home,
+contented; and here specially I was prepossessed with the idea of
+buying a great number of the novels solely for their covers--in short,
+making a collection of Spanish pictorial bindings. But the novels, I
+discovered, were, even in paper, almost a peso each; and since I was
+reluctant to invest two hundred or more dollars in a mere beginning, the
+idea vanished. Their imaginative quality, however, the drawing and color
+printing, were excellent, far better than ours; in fact, we owned
+nothing at all like them.
+
+They had a freedom of cruelty, a brutality of statement, of truth,
+absent in American sentimentality: where women were without clothes they
+were naked, anatomically accounted for, as were the men; and the
+symbolical representations of labor and injustice were instinct with
+blood and anguish. A surprising number of stories by Blasco Ibáñez were
+evident; and it struck me that if I had read him in those casual bright
+copies, without the ponderous weight of his American volumes and
+uncritical reputation, I might have found a degree of enjoyment. There
+were a great many magazines, mostly Spanish, gayly covered but with the
+stupidest contents imaginable--the bad reproductions of contemporary
+photographs on vile grey paper; although one, La Esefa, admirably
+reproduced, in vivid color and titles, the Iberian spirit of the lighter
+Goya.
+
+Though I had been on narrow streets before, I had never seen one with
+the dramatic quality of Obispo. Hands might almost have touched across
+its paved way, and the sidewalks, no more than amplified curbs, hardly
+allowed for the width of a skirt. It was cooled by shadow, except for a
+narrow brilliant strip, and the open shops were like caverns. The
+windows were particularly notable, for they held the wealth, the choice,
+of what was offered within: diamonds and Panama hats, tortoise shell,
+Canary Island embroidery, and perfumery. There were cafés that
+specialized in minute cakes of chocolate and citron and almond paste set
+out in rows of surprisingly delicate workmanship, and shallow cafés
+whose shelves were banked with cordials and rons, gin, whiskies, and
+wine. There were bottles of eccentric shape holding divinely colored
+liqueurs, squat bottles and pinched, files of amber sauternes, miniature
+glass bears from Russia filled with Kümmel, yellow and green chartreuse,
+syrupy green and white menthes, the Cinziano vermouth of Italy, Spanish
+cider, and orderly companies of mineral waters.
+
+These stores had little zinc-topped bars, and there were always groups
+of men sipping and conversing in their rapid intent manner. The street
+was crowded and, invariably allowing the women the wall, it was
+necessary to step again and again from the sidewalk. They were mostly
+Americans: the Cuban women abroad were in glittering automobiles,
+already elaborate in lace and jewels and dipping hats, and drenched in
+powder. They were, occasionally, when young, extremely beautiful, with a
+dark haughtiness that I had always found irresistible.
+
+In my early impressionable years it had continually been my fate to be
+entranced by lovely disagreeable girls with cloudy black hair and skin
+stained with brown rather than pink. Imperious girls with elevated chins
+and straight sensitive noses! They had never, by any chance, paid the
+slightest attention to me; and the Cubans passing by with an air of
+supreme disdain called back my old interest and my old desire. I felt,
+for the moment, very young again and capable of romantic folly, of
+following a particular beauty to where her motor--a De Dion
+landaulet--disappeared into a courtyard with the closing of the great
+iron-bound doors.
+
+A marked, not to say sensational, transformation of my own person had
+been a conspicuous part of that young imaginary business; for, though I
+was fat and clumsy, I managed to see myself tall and engaging, and dark,
+too; or, anyhow, a figure to beguile a charming girl. Something of that
+hopeless process had taken place in me once more, now the vainer for the
+fact that even my youth had gone. The quality which called back a past
+illusion was very positive in Havana, and my feeling for the city was
+greatly enriched, further defined. It was charged with hazard for what
+men like me had dreamed, leaving the actuality for the pretended; the
+pretended, that so easily became the false, was, in Havana, real.
+
+The Obispo under its striped awnings, with its merchandise of coral and
+high combs and pineapple cloths; the women magnetic with a Spain that
+had slept with the East, the South; the bright blank walls, lemon
+yellow, blue, rose; the palms borne against the sky on trunks like
+dulled pewter; the palpable sense of withdrawn dark mystery, all created
+an atmosphere of a too potent seductiveness. The street ended in the
+Plaza de Armas, with the ultramarine sea beyond; and as I sat, facing
+the arched low buff façade of the President's Palace, my brain was
+filled with vivid fragments of emotion.
+
+What suddenly I realized about Havana, the particular triumph of its
+miraculous vitality, was that it had never, like so much of Italy,
+degenerated into a museum of the past, it was not in any aspect
+mortuary. Its relics of the conquistadores were swept over by the flood
+of to-day. Yet I began to be vaguely conscious of the history of Cuba,
+of that Cuba from which Cortez had set sail, in the winter of fifteen
+hundred and nineteen, for Mexico. Later this would, perhaps, become
+clearer to me; not pedantically, but because the spirit of that early
+time was still alive. I made no effort to direct my mind into deep
+channels. What must come must come; and if it were a gin rickey rather
+than the slavery of the repartimento system, I'd be little enough
+disturbed.
+
+The gin rickey proved to be an immediate reality, in the patio of the
+Inglaterra--a stream of silver bubbles shot into a glass where an
+emerald lime floated vivaciously. I had no intention of going out again
+until the shadows of the late afternoon had lengthened far toward the
+white front of the Gomez-Mena building across the plaza; and after lunch
+I went up to the quiet of my room. I should, certainly, write no
+letters, read--idly--none of the few books published about Cuba, which
+were on my table; and I began the essays of James Huneker called
+Bedouins. His rhapsodies over Mary Garden, as colorful in style as the
+glass above the window, I soon dropped and picked indifferently among
+the novels that remained. A poor lot--the thin current stream of
+American fiction, doubly pale in Havana.
+
+The day wheeled from south to west. I was perfectly contented to linger
+doing nothing, scarcely thinking, in the subdued and darkened heat.
+There was a heavy passage of trunks through the echoing hall without,
+the melancholy calling of the evening papers rose on the air; I was
+enveloped in the isolation of a strange tongue. To sit as still as
+possible, as receptive as possible, to stroll aimlessly, watch
+indiscriminately, was the secret of conduct in my situation. Nothing
+could be planned or provided for. The thing was to get enjoyment from
+what I did and saw; what benefit I should receive, I knew from long
+experience, would be largely subconscious. I had been in Havana scarcely
+more than a day, and already I had collected a hundred impressions and
+measureless pleasure. How wise I had been to come ... extravagantly,
+with--as it were--a flower in my coat, a gesture of protest, of
+indifference, to all that the world now emphasized.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+However, the tranquillity of the afternoon was sharply interrupted by my
+going, unexpectedly, to the races at Oriental Park. I had to dress with
+the utmost rapidity, leaving the choice of a tie to chance, for the dun
+car of the United States Military Attaché was waiting for me. The
+Attaché, handsomely bearing the brown seal of Philippine campaigns,
+abstracted in manner, sat forward with an imperturbable military
+chauffeur, while the back of the car was flooded by the affable speech
+of a Castilian marquis whose variety of experience in the realms of
+expert and dangerous games had been limited only by their known forms.
+It was unquestionably the mixture of my commonplace Presbyterian blood
+and incurable habit of romance that gave me a distinct satisfaction in
+my surroundings. I was glad that the Marquis was what he was and that
+he held a trans-continental motor record; it pleased my honest
+democratic instincts when other cars were held back for our progress;
+and, finally, the deep chairs on the veranda of the Jockey Club were
+precisely right for a lounging afternoon in an expensive sporting
+atmosphere.
+
+The race track seemed to me long--was it a mile?--and, with the horses
+at a starting post across from the grandstand, I couldn't tell one from
+another. The grandstand was on the right, and beyond the park were low
+monotonous lines of stables. It had been raining, the track was heavy,
+and the race that followed the blowing of a bugle covered the silk of
+the jockeys with mud. My pleasure, as always, slowly subsided at the
+persistent intrusion of an inner destructive questioning. Incontestably
+the racing, the horses lining fretfully and scrambling through the muddy
+pools, left me cold. The sweep of the Jockey Club, too, was
+comparatively empty of interest; the spectators there, though they were
+more or less intent upon the results posted on the board opposite, were
+not the immemorial onlookers at such affairs of sweepstakes, selling
+plates and furloughs.
+
+The Cuban women present, elaborately dressed for shaded lawns and salons
+de thé, were largely foreign to the wide-spread open spectacle. I
+remembered English races where groups of dukes with ruddy features, in
+rough tweeds, sat through drizzling afternoons on their iron-shod seat
+ricks, and women of title, in waterproofs and harsh brogues, tramped
+through the sloshing turf ... an attitude far removed from Havana. A
+group of royal palms, lifted in the middle distance, alone gave the
+races an exotic air; though they were, of course, promoted and ridden by
+Americans, and their mechanics were quite those which operated in New
+Orleans and Butte and Baltimore. Now I was annoyed because I had,
+thoughtlessly, come; I might as well have gone to the baseball game in
+what had formerly been the bull ring.
+
+Yet I could retire to my speculations for escape, and I thought how
+peculiarly modern outdoor games, sport, belong to the British--to them
+and their relatives beyond the sea. I remembered, in this connection,
+the story of a French vicomte I knew, a man of imposing build, who, in
+yellow gloves, shot field larks attracted by the flashing of a mirror
+manipulated by his valet. Le sport! But the Spaniards, bred to the
+delicate agility of bull fighting, trained in endurance on the
+inconceivably fast pelota courts, were more athletic than the French;
+though, as a race, they were inclined to delegate their games to
+professionals. The sporting amateur, in spite of the Marquis, was a
+rarity; rather they chose to be lookers-on at brilliant diversions which
+retained an appreciable amount of a mediæval cruelty diversified from
+our own brutal strain.
+
+This, naturally, had been influenced, strengthened, in Cuba by the
+climate, the breath of the tropics; even the winters were not conducive
+to violent exercise, aside from the fact that that was the prerogative
+of stolid temperaments. It was the deliberate, the unexcitable, who
+most excelled at trials of personal muscular skill; and neither of them
+were at home below certain latitudes. For myself, I was grateful, for I
+hadn't much in common with the exemplifications of field skill I had
+met. They were very apt to pay for their success by the absence of the
+attributes I particularly admired; often they were snobs of a very
+exasperating type--monuments of college beef with irreproachable hair,
+sacrosanct pins, and insensate conventional mentalities.
+
+A race at an end, the jockeys, carrying their saddles, trooped to the
+judges' stand to be weighed, and I was shocked by their wizened,
+preternaturally cunning faces. They were like pygmies of a strange breed
+in red and yellow and blue satins; faultless for their purpose, on the
+ground they were extraordinary, leather-skinned, with puckering eyes,
+drawn mouths, and distorted bodies. They wrangled among themselves in
+shrill or foggy voices--a very depressing specialization of humanity.
+But the horses were magnificent, slender and shining. I admired them
+from a distance, glad that it was no part of my responsibility to ride.
+Long ago, under the pressure of an untender emotion, I had learned to
+sit on a horse through his reasonable moments; but I had never become at
+ease, and I stopped riding when, on the country road of a May Sunday
+noon, a tall sorrel ran away with me so fast and so far that we passed
+three churches with their scattering congregations.
+
+There were, on the veranda, drinks, and even they--the Scotch
+highballs--translated into Spanish, had an unfamiliar and borrowed
+sound. It was on my return, stopping at the Telegrafo Café, that I
+learned the delightful possibility of a Daiquiri cocktail. It was twice
+as large as ordinary, what in the north was called a double; but no
+Daiquiri out of Cuba could be thought of in comparison. Only one other
+drink might be considered--a Ramos gin-fizz. My extreme allegiance had
+been given to the latter. I was not willing, even in the Telegrafo, to
+depose it from first place; but the Telegrafo was a pleasanter spot
+than the New Orleans Stag bar. I could see the beginning of the Prado,
+with the swirl of cars on their afternoon round to the Malecón. Some
+arc-lights, just turned on, were sources of color, like great
+symmetrical lemons, rather than of illumination. After another rain the
+bare flambeau trees would burst into fiery bloom.
+
+I was alone, and, sauntering back to the Inglaterra, through the gallery
+that had once been the Paseo Isabel, I came on my flower man, who
+advanced with a smile and a close nosegay of gardenias. A curious
+flower, I thought, getting water for them in a glass. They didn't wilt,
+as was usual, but turned brown and faded in the manner of a lovely
+pallid woman--a simile I had used in Linda Condon. A flower that
+belonged less to nature than to drawing-rooms, to rococo salons and the
+opera loges of eighteen forty, and not at all to the present in the
+United States. But worn low on the neck, it was entirely appropriate to
+the black hair of the Cuban woman. Gold hair, the fair temperament, had
+no business with gardenias: bouquets of white sweet peas looped with
+pale green and silver ribbon, yes; and dark bunches of moss roses; the
+old bouquets of concentric rings of buds in lace paper! They were the
+property of the girls I had known, the frank girls with clear grey eyes
+and the appealing girls with eyes like forget-me-nots. Something more
+poignant, a heavier disturbing perfume, was necessary against a figure
+seen only from a balcony or with a vague fleetness behind a grille
+gracefully wrought out of iron.
+
+My shutters now were opened, and I could make out, against the dimming
+sky, the languid folds of the Spanish flag above the entrance of the
+Centro Gallego--the standard that had conquered the western tropics,
+only, in turn, to be subdued by a freedom of the wind mightier than His
+Most Catholic Majesty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was some question of where I'd go for dinner, for in Havana there
+were many cafés to explore--the Dos Hermanos, the Paris, the Florida,
+the Hotel de Luz, the Miramar; but, finally, I walked down to the Prado,
+to the sea and the Miramar, a little because of its situation, directly
+on the Malecón, but principally for the reason that it had one of the
+most beautiful names possible, a name which called up the image of a
+level tide so smooth that it held in shining replica the forts, the
+ships, and the clouds. Tables were prepared for dinner in the
+restaurant, while those on the terrace were without cloths; but there I
+determined to sit, and the waiter whose attention I captured, after a
+long delay, agreed.
+
+A solitary couple had their heads together by the window, and they, with
+myself, were the only diners. It was, evidently, not now the place to go
+to at this hour. Beyond the dining-room, a patio, or rather an open
+court, was set for dancing, melancholy as such spaces can be, deserted
+and half-lighted; but I saw that a considerable activity was expected
+much later.
+
+I was glad that the terrace was empty, for, with the light now faded
+from the sea and its blueness merging into black, the remote
+tranquillity of evening was happier without a sharp chatter of voices.
+The Miramar, considering its place--the most advantageous in all
+Havana--and fame was surprisingly small: scarcely more than two stories
+high, the sombre maroon walls with their long windows hardly filled an
+angle of the Malecón. The dinner was slow in arriving, the silver made
+its appearance, a goblet was brought separately, a plate of French bread
+was later followed by its butter. The minute native oysters were no more
+than shreds adhering to their shells, but they had a notable flavor; a
+crawfish was at its brightest apogee; and an omelet browned in a
+delicate perfection of powdered sugar.
+
+I deserted Spanish wine, the admirable Riscal, for champagne; for there
+was about an air of departed charm, the whisper of old waltzes and
+tarleton, that demanded commemoration. The Miramar had been the gay
+center of that mid-century life which had folded Havana in the lasting
+influence of its memories. A gaiety not even at a disadvantage compared
+to the feverish society of to-day! The bodices then had been no more
+than scraps of chambery gauze and Chinese ribbon below shoulders to the
+whiteness of which the entire feminine age had been devoted. The
+flounced bell skirts had swung airily on gracious silk clappers.
+
+The automobiles on the Malecón multiplied, for the night was hot; soon
+there was a solid double opposed procession on the broad sweeping drive.
+This was a triumph of American engineering and, I had no doubt, an
+improvement on the informality of rocks and débris that had existed
+before. Yet I should liked to have seen it when the promenade had not
+yet been laid down with mechanical precision, in, perhaps, the early
+seventies. Then there were sea baths cut in the live rock at the end of
+the Paseo Isabel, at the Campos Eliseos, where the water was like a
+cooler liquid green air, and where, after storms, a foaming surf poured
+over the barriers. There were no motors then, but volantes and the
+modern quintrins, with two horses, one outside the shafts, and a riding
+calesero in vermilion and gold lace; and, latest of all, as new as
+possible, the victorias.
+
+Neither, then, was the Prado paved, but the trees were infinitely
+finer--five rows there were in fifty-seven--when the clamor of the city
+was, in great part, peals of bells. This was a familiar process with me,
+to leave the present for the past in a mood of irrational regret. But
+never for the heroic, the real past; the years I chose to imagine lay
+hardly behind the horizon; in Italy it had been the Risorgimento, at
+farthest the villeggiatura of Antonio Longo or the viole d'amore of
+Cimarosa in churches. And now, drinking my champagne on the empty
+flagged terrace of the Miramar, facing, across the parade of
+automobiles, the blank curtain of the night, starred on the right by the
+lights of castellated forts, my mind vibrated with grace notes no longer
+heard outside the faint distilled sweetness of music boxes.
+
+As if in derision of this, a loud unexpected music rose from the
+bandstand in the Plaza, and I saw that a flood of people, seated or
+moving along the pavements and through the lanes of chairs, had
+gathered. Nothing, I thought, could have delighted me more; but my
+anticipation was soon smothered by the absurdity of the selections: they
+were not from Balfé nor Rossini, neither military nor the accented
+rhythm of Spain ... the opening number was Parsifal, blown into the
+profound night with a convention of brassy emphasis.
+
+At the total destruction of my pleasure I cursed the pretentious
+stupidity of the band-master and a great deal else of modern Cuba. I
+remembered particularly some regrets, locally expressed, that the
+Spanish domination was no more. Things, it was said, were better ordered
+then. But this was a position the vainness of which I couldn't join: it
+was no part of my disposition to combat, or even regret, the inevitable.
+My course--quite other--was to project myself into periods whose very
+loss formed most of their charm. Gone, they took on the tender memories
+of the dead, and were invested with the dignity, the beauty, of a warm
+fragility.
+
+Two girls were now seated at a table by the entrance, and, though they
+were alone for the moment, it was evident that they had no intention of
+remaining in that unprofitable state longer than necessary. Their fleet
+appraising glances rested on me and the silver bucket by my chair, and
+one permitted the shadow of a discreet smile to appear on her carmined
+lips. She was pretty, lightly dressed in a flowery summer stuff, but she
+was as gold in coloring as corn silk; an intrusion in Havana I seriously
+deplored. The other was dark, but she was, at the same time,
+disagreeable; something had annoyed her excessively, and I made no move.
+Such company was occasionally entertaining, in a superficial
+conversational sense; but, I was obliged to add, not often.
+
+I went over all the informal girls I could recall who had been worth the
+effort to cultivate them, either charming or wise or sensitive, and my
+bag, unlike Chopin's or what George Moore reported his, was
+discouragingly slim. They had been, but perhaps of necessity,
+materialists, valuers only of the expensively concrete; yes, the
+majority of such adventures had been sordid. It was due, without
+question, to certain deterrent qualities in my own personality; but even
+more, I was convinced, to the fact that, in America, girls, or at least
+those of my youth, regarded emotion as portentously synonymous with
+ruin. Emotion, for nice girls, was deprecated; their sense of modesty,
+of shame, was magnified at the expense of everything else. This,
+together with the tragic difference in the age of marriage in nature and
+in society, had condemned the United States to very low levels of
+feeling.
+
+Unfortunately I had been born into the most rigid of all societies--a
+prosperous and Presbyterian middle-class; an influence that succeeded in
+making religion hideous before I was fifteen, planting in me, too, the
+belief that man was, in his instinctive life, filthy. I outgrew the
+latter, but never the first; and now, looking back, I could recognize
+how that lauded creed had nearly damned me to a hell far surpassing in
+dreadfulness anything of its own bitter imagining. The cold metaphysical
+fog had saturated us all alike.... How dreary my early experience was
+... what detestable travesties of passion! A carful of young men soon
+stopped at the curb of the Miramar, and the two girls, dark and gold,
+were immediately invested with the politest attentions. There was a
+chorus of laughter and protests and suggestions, in which a privileged
+waiter joined; and afterwards they vociferously left to dance at
+Carmelo.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Walking generally in the direction of my room, I left the Prado for an
+especially dramatic, no, melodramatic, street, where the bare walls and
+iron bolted doors were made startling by the white glare of electric
+lights. Fixed to the walls, infrequently, were the wrought-iron brackets
+of the earlier lanterns, converted, it might be, for the period before
+the present, into gas jets. In that watery illumination such streets
+must have seemed less amazing than now, and entirely natural with only
+the oil lanterns lifting a small surface of masonry or an isolated angle
+out of the night. Indeed, whole districts were dark, except for a rare
+lamp privately maintained as an obligation of grace. That darkness, like
+the streets, was mediæval; they belonged one to the other--ways through
+which it was congruous to carry a flare and a sword, practical measures
+both.
+
+These precautions had been long discarded, but the passages themselves
+were unchanged, not a stone had shifted; they were, particularly at
+night, the Middle Ages. And it was as though a sudden blaze had been
+created by unholy magic; a sparkling and infernal radiance, throwing
+into intolerable clearness the decent reticence of the time. The arc
+lights gave the streets an absolute air of unreality and tragic
+strangeness. Moving in them, I had the feeling of blundering awake into
+a dream, of being irretrievably lost in an illusion of potential horror.
+An open door with its glimpse into an inner room only increased the
+oppression: it, too, was brilliant with electricity, a room of
+unrelieved icy pallor, except for a warmer blur under an Agony on the
+Cross, where a small company of men and women sat in a rigid blanched
+formality that might have been death.
+
+It was quite natural, a commonplace of Havana; but rather than a picture
+of familiar life, it resembled the memento mori of a grotto. My thoughts
+turned to the symbols and representations of the Catholic Church--a
+business of blood and torment and flame, of Sebastian torn with arrows
+and a canonized girl, whose name I forgot, carrying her eyeballs in a
+hand. Curiously enough, the spirit which had given birth to this
+suffering had been popularly lost, together with any conception of the
+ages in which it occurred; and all that remained was a pathological
+horror. Italy and Spain were saturated by it--Italy in the revolting wax
+spectacles of Easter, and Spain with the veritable crucifixions of
+to-day.
+
+It was, I supposed, to a certain extent unavoidable in an establishment
+whose hold on the ponderable present depended on threats and promises
+laid in the future. But it seemed to me unfortunate, to say the least,
+that a church whose business was life should be so concerned with smoky
+death. Threats and promises! The early history of Cuba, I remembered,
+was inbound with the administrative and protective powers of the Church:
+in fifteen hundred and sixteen the native Cubeños were put in the charge
+of the Order of Jeronimites, localized in La Espanola--Santo Domingo.
+The double motive of the Spanish Christian kings in the western
+hemisphere had been conversion and gold, but which of these was
+uppermost it was impossible to determine. However, when the gold, the
+temporal interest, decreased in one locality, the spiritual concern of
+Seville shifted to the more productive regions.
+
+That was a period, a conquest, when a violent death was a greater
+blessing than living in a state of damnable heresy; and so, between the
+saving of their souls and the loss of their bodies in the king's mines,
+the natives were thoroughly cared for. It must be said, though, that de
+las Casas, a priest whose spirit was above any intimidation or venality,
+denounced the outrages against the Cuban Indians to the shining heavens,
+the cerulean sea, the Audencia, and the Throne. But his humanitarianism
+was ineffectual against a system founded on the belief that a god had
+given the earth and its recalcitrant people for the profit and glory,
+the servants, of a single religious dogma.
+
+It was, possibly, a mental imperfection which gave impressions,
+emotions, such a great suggestibility. Returning toward the Inglaterra,
+I had no intention of losing myself in the mazes of applied theology;
+and I speedily dropped such a sombre topic from my thoughts. Turning
+back to the Prado, I found the walks filled with men, progressing slowly
+or seated on the flat marble benches along the sides. Whenever a woman
+did pass on foot, their interest and speculations were endless: heads
+turned in rows, sage remarks were exchanged, and tentative simpaticas
+murmured. Her mother--if she had the slightest pretensions to youth or
+good looks--was fervently blessed for so fetching a daughter. Here, of
+course, was the defect of the local attitude toward women--it put the
+emphasis perpetually on a gallantry affecting the men more even than the
+women. There was a constant danger of becoming one-sided.
+
+The Telegrafo and the Louvre were crowded, with more refrescos and ices
+on the table than authoritative drinks; the cigarettes of the discursive
+throngs in the Parque Central were like a sheet of fire-flies, and the
+Marti and Pairet theatres were spreading abroad the audiences of their
+second evening shows. The patio of the Inglaterra was well filled, and I
+stopped there; not, however, for a naranjada. Some late suppers were
+still occupying the dining-room, and a drunken American was gravely
+addressing a table and meeting with a mechanical politeness that I
+admired for its sustained patience. He left, finally, and wandered
+unsteadily, a subject of entertainment for his fellows and a mark of
+contempt to the Cubans present. Beyond me were some beautifully dressed
+English--two men in the final perfection of easy masculine garb and a
+girl, flushed with beauty, in pearls. On the other hand a young
+Frenchman, decorated with the most honorable of war ribbons, and two
+women, all in mourning, were conversing in the difficult Parisian idiom.
+
+I should have liked to be at either table--their attractions were equal;
+but, forced to remain alone, I thought of how rude the English would
+have been had I moved over to them. The English would have been boorish,
+and the French would have met me with an impenetrable polite reserve.
+Both would regard me as an idiot or an agent; to have spoken to them
+would have been an affront. And yet I was confident that we should have
+got on very well: I was not without a name in London, and the French
+were delightfully sensitive to any practising of the arts. The English,
+I gathered from their unguarded talk, were cruising on a yacht now lying
+in Havana harbor; and I saw myself, the following morning, going off to
+them in a smart tender and sitting under the white awning spread aft,
+with a whisky and soda, talking or not, but happily aware of the shining
+brass and mahogany fittings, the immaculate paint and gay pennants.
+
+I had always liked worldly pomp and settings, marble Georgian houses
+with the long windows open directly on closed greens and statues of
+lead; and to linger, before going down to dinner, on a minstrel's
+gallery above a stone hall and gathered company. I'd rather be on a
+yacht than on an excursion boat; yet I infinitely preferred reading
+about the latter. For some hidden or half perceived reason, yachts were
+not impressive in creative prose; there the concerns and pleasures of
+aristocracy frequently appeared tawdry and unimportant. Even its
+heroism, in the valor of battle and imperturbable sacrifice, was less
+moving to me than simpler affairs. Yet there was no doubt but that I was
+personally inclined to the extremes of luxury; and this apparent
+contradiction brought to my life, my writing, the problem of a devotion
+to words as disarmingly simple as the leaves of spring--as simple and as
+lovely in clear color--about the common experience of life and death,
+together with an absorbing attention for Manchu women and exotic
+children and emeralds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following day, hot and still, with the exception of capricious
+movements of air in paved shaded places, was overcast, the brilliancy of
+Havana, of the white and green plazas, subdued. And this softening of
+sharp lines and blazing façades seemed to influence, too, the noises,
+the calls, of the streets, so that it was all apparently insubstantial,
+like the ultimate romantic mirage of a city. I wandered along Neptuno
+Street to Belascoin, and then to the Parque Maceo, where I ignored the
+massed bronze and granite of its statue for the slightly undulating
+shimmering tide. In the distance the sea was lost in the sky--a nebulous
+gray expanse such as might have existed before the beginning of
+comparative solidity. I lost all sense of time, the centuries were
+jumbled together like mangos in a basket. Yes, they were no greater, no
+more important or stable, than tropical fruit.
+
+The vivid spectacle of Cuba, for example, contracted to a palm's
+breadth, the island became nothing more than the glimmer of a torch in
+illimitable dusk. It had been discovered by Columbus, a presumptuous
+term used arrogantly in the sense of created; an Arcadian shore where,
+because food grew without cultivation, without effort, and the gold was
+soft for beating into bracelets, the natives lived easily and
+ornamentally and in peace. They wore, rather than steel and the harsh
+shirts of the Inquisition, the feathers of birds with woven dyed quills
+and fragrant grasses. They sang, they danced with a notable grace, loved
+and died in the simplicity of bohios of palm board and thatch under nine
+Caciques.
+
+Then, in the drawing of a breath, they were all destroyed, gone, killed
+by slavery, in the name of God on the points of swords, by the
+rapacity, the corruption, the diseases, of civilization. A Spanish Cuba
+rose--Iberian and yet singularly different--a business of
+Captain-General and Teniente Rey, of alcalde and alcaide, of Santiago de
+Cuba and San Cristóbal de la Habana. The French under Jacques Sores, and
+the English under Drake, sailed over the horizon. In less than a second,
+the expiration of a sigh, Diego de Velasquez and Narvaez, Isabel de
+Bobadilla, Rojas and Guzman, the merchant Diego Perez in vain laying the
+guns of the Magdalena in defense of the past, had gone. The Cedula from
+Madrid, in eighteen hundred and twenty-five, began the conspiracies,
+Tacón came and went, the fiscals beat free colored men to death and
+entertained the negro women naked at balls. The Lopez rebellion was
+followed by the ten years' war of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight and
+the peace of Zanjon, the great rebellion and Weyler.
+
+There remained now the indefinite sea and a city withdrawn, secretive,
+made vaguely beautiful by intangible voices, all its voices that had
+laughed and shouted, whispered and cried; and by the towers and walls
+merged in a single pattern, the old and the new drawn together by an
+aspect of impermanence, freed from the deceptive appearance of solidity.
+Suddenly its history had been shown to me in a flash of emotion, a mood
+of feeling. I hadn't come to Cuba ignorant of the land, but I had
+determined to slight what was but written inanimate fact. I had no
+disposition for instruction: books were powerless to create La Punta for
+me, it must bear its own credentials ... it might become, to my
+uncertain advantage, as important as a Daiquiri cocktail, as a Larrañaga
+cigar, but hardly more.
+
+In any other case I should have cheated myself, not only of pleasure,
+the relaxation possible to honesty of mind, but of any hope of future
+material. The creative habit was the most tireless and frugal in
+existence: there was nothing--no experience, person, disillusionment, or
+pain--not endlessly sounded for its every note and meaning. No one could
+predict what would be indispensable, just as it was impossible to
+foresee, in the projection of a novel, where its fine moments occurred.
+And, returning to the descriptive and historical books on Cuba, left so
+largely unread at the Inglaterra, it was probable that they had omitted,
+in their effort for literal and conventional emphasis, what might in
+their subject be vivifying to me.
+
+This, however, was beyond spoiling--a history so picturesque, as I have
+intimated, that its very vividness, its commonest phases, had become the
+threadbare material of obvious romance. But, outside of all that, the
+other Havana, the mid-Victorian Pompeii, a city that none could have
+predicted or told me of, offered the incentive of its particular and
+rare charm. In the Parque Maceo, on the sea wall, my imagination stirred
+with the first beginnings of a story: it would take place in the period
+when the avaricious grip of Spain was loosening, a story of secret
+patriotism and the idealism of youth, set in marble salons, at the
+opera and the cafés. It would not concern itself with any love except
+the fidelity between two men, a story of friendship.
+
+There it would be different from The Arrow of Gold and Doña Rita; no
+peignoirs, thank you, but a formality, a passionate propriety, in
+keeping with the social gravity and impersonal devotion of the very
+young. There must be crinoline--would I never escape from that!--and
+candelabra with glittering prisms; Spanish soldiers in striped linen and
+officials with green-tasselled canes. My youth, he'd come from the
+United States, would have his little dinners at the Restaurant
+Française, in Cuba Street number seventy-two, and his refrescos at the
+Café Dominica. In the end he'd leave Havana, having accomplished nothing
+but the loss of his illusions for the gain of a memory like a dream, but
+his friend, a Cuban--I had seen him that first night at dinner in the
+Inglaterra--would be killed. How....
+
+It was time to go back to the hotel, and the story receded. I walked
+too far on Belascoin Street, all the way to Salud; and, past the Tacón
+Market, came out on the Parque de Colon, where now there was a hot dusty
+wind, like a localized sirocco, and I was glad to reach my room. The
+reflection of the colored glass above the window was hardly discernible
+on the tiles; the interior was permeated by a shadow which made the
+ceiling appear high beyond computation; and my wardrobe trunk, standing
+open, exhibited a rack of limp neckties. I turned again to the novels on
+the table and again let them drop, unattended, from a listless hand.
+Tepid water! And I wondered--a constant subject with me--when we should
+have a new vigorous American literature, a literature absolutely native,
+by men who had not, like myself, been to school to Turgenev and the
+English lyrical poetry. Henry James had found the United States lacking
+in background; the lack was evident, but not in the country of his
+birth.
+
+This was not a complaint against The Velvet Glove except as it equally
+applied to me; but an intense desire for a fresh talent, an ability to
+which we could, without reserve, take off our hats. The fact hit me that
+I was forty, although it was still the fashion among reviewers to speak
+of me as a promising young man, and that there were patches of grey hair
+on my temples. Yet I had been, everything considered, remarkably
+successful; there was no need for sentimental regret, a trait of mental
+feebleness.
+
+I decided to do something positive that evening, to go to the theatre,
+or, if it were playing, to see the Jai Alai. The latter was possible,
+and, by way of the Telegrafo, I reached the Hotel Florida for dinner; a
+restaurant which, because of the windows looking down on it, had the
+pleasant individual air of a courtyard. The music played, diners came
+and went, and I gazed up at the shallow balconies in the hopefulness of
+an incorrigible imagination. The Fronton Jai Alai--in Havana the game,
+pelota, had taken the title of its court--was a long way from Obispo
+Street, but I knew when we had reached it by the solid volume of
+shouting that escaped from the high concrete building into the dim
+neighborhood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Inside, the court was an immense expanse with granite-laid walls, a long
+rectangle, one side of which was formed by the steeply banked rows of
+spectators. Regular spaces were marked by white lines on the playing
+floor, and at one end the score was hung against the names of the
+players, now two teams--the Azules and the Blancos. The boxes were above
+the cement ledges packed with standing men, by a promenade, where the
+betting was conducted, cigars sold, and a small active bar maintained.
+It was the night of a gala benefit, for the Damas de Caridad, and I had
+been fortunate in getting a single box seat. I was late, though, and the
+game progressing; still, I was the first in our railed space; but the
+others, who proved to be Americans, soon followed--three prosperous men,
+manufacturers I thought, with wives in whom native good taste had been
+given the opportunities of large resources.
+
+One of the women--who, in the arrangement of the box, sat beside
+me--smiled with a magnetism that had easily survived the loss of her
+youth; she was rather silent than not, but the rest swept into a
+conversation in their best public manner. A man accompanying them, it
+developed, knew Cuba and Jai Alai, and he secured for the amusement of
+the others a cesta, the basket-like racquet worn strapped to the arm. It
+was from him I discovered that the court was two hundred and ten feet
+long and thirty-six feet wide; while the service consisted in dropping
+the ball and, on its rebound, catching it in the cesta and throwing it
+against the far end wall. From there, with a sharp smack audible all
+over the Fronton, the ball shot back, if not a fault, within a marked
+area, and one of the opposing side caught it, in the air or on the first
+bounce, and returned it against the end wall. At first I could see
+nothing but the violent activity of the players, frozen into statuesque
+attitudes of throwing; vigorous figures in, mostly, white, with soft red
+silk sashes. I heard the ball hit, and saw it rolling out of play; and
+then, with some slight realization of the rapidity of its flight, I was
+able to follow the course from cesta to wall and floor.
+
+There had never been, I was certain, another game in which instantaneous
+judgment, skill, and endurance had been carried to such a far point.
+There was seldom a fault or error; the ball, flying like a bullet, was
+caught and flung with a single gesture; again and again it carried from
+one end wall to the other, from which it was hurled on. Angles of flight
+were calculated and controlled, the long side wall was utilized.... Then
+a player of the Azules was hit in the ankle, and the abruptness with
+which he went down showed me a possibility I had ignored.
+
+During this the clamor of the audience was indescribable, made up, for
+the most part, of the difficulties of constantly shifting odds and
+betting. The odds changed practically with every passage of the ball:
+opening at, say, five to three against the favorites, as they drew
+steadily ahead in a game of twenty-five points it jumped to eight to
+four, ten to three, anything that could be placed. On the floor a small
+company of bookmakers, distinguished by their scarlet caps, shouted in
+every direction, and betting paper was thrown adroitly through the air
+in hollow rubber balls. Those who had backed at favorable odds the team
+now far ahead were yelling jubilantly, and others were trying, at the
+expense of their lungs, to cover by hedging their probable losses.
+
+There was, however, toward what should have been the end, an
+unlooked-for development--the team apparently hopelessly behind crept
+up. An astounded pause followed, and then an uproar rose that cast the
+former sound into insignificance. Soon the score was practically tied:
+there were shrill entreaties, basso curses, a storm of indiscriminate
+insults. Now the backers of the lesser couple scrambled vocally to take
+advantage of the betting opportunities forever lost--the odds were even,
+then depressed on the other side. When the game was over the noise died
+instantly: men black with passion, shaking with rage, crushing their
+hats or with lifted clenched fists, at once conversed with smiling
+affability. My eyes had been badly strained, and I was glad to leave the
+box and stroll along the promenade. The betting counters were jammed by
+the owners of winning tickets, the men behind the bar were, in their own
+way, as active as the pelota players.
+
+The majority of the boxes were occupied by Cuban families, but yet there
+was an appreciable number of foreigners. A slender girl, in a low dinner
+dress, was sitting on the railing of her box, swinging a graceful
+slipper and smoking a cigarette--New York was indelibly stamped on
+her--and, among the masculine world of Spanish antecedents, she created
+a frank center of interest. For her part, she studied the crowd quite
+blocking the way below her with a cold indifference, the personification
+of young assured arrogance.
+
+A quiniela followed, with six contestants, one against the other in
+successive pairs; but my eyes were now definitely exhausted by the
+necessarily shifting gaze, and my interest fastened on the woman beside
+me. She was at once intimately attached to the people with her and
+abstracted in bearing: a woman not far from fifty, but graceful still
+and, in a flexible black silk crêpe with a broad girdle of jet, still
+desirable. It seemed to me that, in spite of an admirable manner, she
+was a little impatient at the volubility around her; or it might be, in
+contradiction to this, she was exercising a patience based on fortitude.
+It was clear that she hadn't a great deal in common with the man who had
+evidently been married to her for a considerable length of years. They
+spoke little--it was he who had fetched the cesta--both immersed in
+individual thoughts. A woman, I decided, finely sensitive, superior;
+who, as she had grown older, had found no demand for the qualities which
+she knew to be her best.
+
+A painful situation, a shocking waste, from which, for her, there was no
+escape, for she had patently what was known as character. She at once
+was conscious of the absolute need for spiritual freedom and bound by
+commitments paramount to her self-esteem. But even if she had been more
+daring, less conscientious, what could she have gained; what was there
+for her in a society condemned to express the spirit in the terms of
+flesh? She had too much charm, too great a vitality, to be absorbed in
+the superficial affairs of women, the substitute life of charity. And
+once married, probably to a man the model of kindly faith, she was
+caught in a desert of sterile monotony. Even children, I could see, if
+they existed, had not slain her questioning attractive personality.
+
+She smiled at me again, later, her narrow slightly wasting hands clasped
+about a knee--a smile of sympathetic comprehension and unquenchable
+woman. She would have been happier chattering in the obvious strain of
+stupidity behind her: any special beauty was always paid for in the
+imposed loneliness of a spoken or unspoken surrounding resentment. To be
+content with a facile compliment, the majority of tricks at auction
+bridge, mechanical pleasures, was the measure of wisdom for women in
+her situation. The last quiniela over, plainly weary she gathered a
+cloak about her shoulders and left the box, without, as I had hoped,
+some last gesture or even a word: and I pictured her sitting listlessly,
+distraught, in the café to which they were proceeding.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pelota immediately vanished from my mind before the infinitely more
+fundamental and interesting problem of marriage; and--remembering the
+ominous sign of a woman's club on the Malecón--I wondered if the Cuban
+women were contented with the tradition as it had been handed down to
+them. In the life that I knew in the north, an infinitesimal grain of
+sand irritating in the body of the United States, the sacredness of
+matrimony had waned very seriously; it would, of course, go on, probably
+for ever, since no other arrangement could be thought of conciliating
+the necessities of both dreams and property; but, subjected to the
+scrutiny of intelligence rather than sentimentality, it seemed both
+impotent and foolish. The impotence certainly, for whereas my
+grandfather had thirteen children and my mother four--or was it five?--I
+had none. There had always been individuals unrestrained by the
+complicated oaths of the wedding service--a strictly legal proceeding to
+which the church had been permitted to add its furbelows--dissatisfied
+ladies, and gentlemen of the commercial road. I wasn't referring to
+them, but to the look, at once puzzled, humorous, and impatient, that
+lately I had seen wives of probity turn on their husbands.
+
+They expressed the conviction that the purely masculine aphorism to the
+effect that home was the place for women meant nothing more than a
+clearing of the decks for unrestricted action. This was beautifully
+displayed, confirmed, in Havana, where decks were without a single
+impediment; and I speculated about the attitude of the Cuban women in
+houses barred with both actual and metaphorical iron. Tradition weighed
+heavily on their outlook; but there was that club on the Malecón.
+Tradition had bound the farm wives of Pennsylvania, yet they were
+progressively rebelling against the insanity of endless labor and
+isolation. But, perversely, the married groups I saw in Havana were
+remarkably close, simple, and happy. They sat in rows at the concerts on
+the plazas, went off on small excursions, in entire harmony--a thing
+impossible to the born American, with whom such parties began in
+exasperation and ended in nervous exhaustion. An American husband, of
+the class largely evident in Havana, escorted his family abroad with
+truculence and an air of shame at being exposed in such a ridiculous
+situation. If there was more than one household implicated, the men
+invariably drew away together: there was a predominance of cursing and
+the wails of irritably smacked children. The truth was that the citizens
+of the United States, in their feverish passage through life, had
+decidedly a poor time--either restlessness or ambition or
+dissatisfaction destroyed their peace of mind. Labor, more highly paid
+than at any other place or time, got less satisfaction for its money
+than a Cuban mestizo with a peseta.
+
+My thoughts returned abruptly to the point where they had started, to
+marriage, and I hoped that Cuba wouldn't be disorganized by the present
+ferment; that the feminine element, discovering their wrongs, wouldn't
+leave their balconies and patios for the dusty publicity of the street.
+Already a decline had been suffered, first in the loss of mantillas and
+combs, next in the passing of single-horse victorias for unrestrained
+tin locomotives, and then in the hideous flood of electric lighting.
+Still, a great deal of the charm, the empire, of Havana women remained;
+while nothing but utter disaster approached them from the north.
+
+This was no new position for me, and it had never failed to be attacked,
+usually with the insinuation that, spiritually, I was part of Turkey in
+Asia ... a place of gardens where it was not inconceivable that I'd be
+happy: certainly the politics there were no worse than those to which I
+had been inured from birth, with murder on the streets at noon
+distinguished by a white ribbon in its buttonhole. The Armenians were no
+more precariously situated than the Albigenses under Innocent III. I had
+heard, as well, that the governments of Cuba had not been free from
+suspicion, but it was hoped that elections supervised from the United
+States would institute reform. Rare irony! Elections, I should have
+said, going back once more to the beginning, opening to emancipated
+women.
+
+Gathering, in imagination, all the feminine world of Havana into a
+fragrant assembly, I begged them not to separate themselves from their
+privileges; I implored them even--against my personal inclination, for
+there, at least, I was no Turk--not to grow slender, if that meant agile
+excursions into loud spheres of lesser influence. Those others, I
+proceeded, would rapturously exchange a ballot for a seductive ankle, a
+graceful breast, or a flawless complexion. Complexion, or rather its
+absence, brought immeasurably more supporting votes to the women's party
+than convictions. And I added, reprehensibly, some of the things I had
+been privately told, as a writer, by women newly in the professions: I
+exposed the secret of a lecturer on civic improvement--or it might have
+been better babies; I couldn't recall which--who carried a handbagful of
+apostrophies to Paolo and Francesca, and that illogical lot, on her
+travels. She permitted me to read them in a sunny orchard where the
+apples were already, more than ripe, on the ground; and her gaze had
+persistently strayed to the wasting fruit.
+
+The audience melted away--I was unable to discover if they were
+flattered or annoyed--and I found myself actually seated at one of the
+small tables on the fringe of the thé dansant at the Sevilla. The
+Cascade Orchestra from the Biltmore, their necks hung with the imitation
+wreaths of Hawaii, were playing a musical pastiche of many lands and a
+single purpose; and there, foxtrotting intently among girls from the New
+York Follies and girls on follies of their own, colliding with race
+track touts from Jefferson Park and suave predatory gentlemen of San
+Francisco, I found a whole section of young Cuba.
+
+They returned, in the intermissions, to chaperons complacent or secretly
+disturbed, where they had, principally, refrescos; but their attitude
+was one of progress and conscious, patronizing superiority to
+old-fashioned customs. The daughters of what, in many aspects, was the
+Spanish-Cuban aristocracy of the island, were dancing publicly in a
+hotel. Here, already, was an example of emancipation. I disliked it,
+naturally, not on moral grounds, but because it foreshadowed the
+destruction of individuality, the loss, eventually, of Havana, of Cuba,
+of Spain ... of everything distinguished that saved the world from
+monotony.
+
+They danced--the Cuban youth--with notable facility, adding to the
+hesitation waltz something specially their own, a more intense rhythm, a
+greater potentiality; their bodies were at once more fluid and positive;
+they were swept up into a mood unknown to the adamant ornaments of
+Country Club verandas in the north. A cosmopolitan waiter, anxious to
+have me finish and move on, hovered about the table, ignorant of a
+traditional courtesy as well as of the requirements of the climate. All
+the objectionable features of Broadway cafés, of public ostentation,
+mingled servility and insolence, dishonesty--my piña colado was diluted
+beyond taste--were being flung, with the air of a favor, into Havana.
+Although, for the best, I was even then a little late, I was glad that I
+had seen the city when I did, just as I was glad to have known Venice
+before the Campanile fell, and the Virginia Highlands when they had not
+been modernized. The change of Havana within itself, from palm thatch to
+marble, was entrancing; but the arbitrary imposition of stupid habits,
+standards, conduct, from outside, damnable.
+
+In the end the waiter was more forceful than my determination to remain
+until my drink and thoughts were at an end, and I rose with them
+uncompleted, in a very ill temper. If Cuba hadn't enough innate taste
+and nationality to save herself, she must go the popular way to
+obliteration. So much else had gone! But later, at the Hotel de Luz,
+untouched yet by the hand of imported cupidity, my happiness in Havana
+returned.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Hotel de Luz, inimitably Cuban, with the shipping lying vaguely
+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 Cristóbal 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 Malecón. 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 façades 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 Cité 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 carré, 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
+Malecón 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 cafés 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 Cabañas 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
+Cubeños, 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 Cubeños 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.
+
+Or, in Havana, of the oranges. In the meanwhile the patios gave me an
+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 café 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
+Larrañaga, 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 Cabañas 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
+cafés 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 malagueña, 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 coryphées 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My interest, however, in the American in Havana had vanished, my
+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 cafés 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 Nuñez: 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
+crêpe-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 façade, a determined
+ringing crowing filled the air. Beyond the arched entrance there was an
+area of pavement with tables and a limited café 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 café 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 ñañigos.... 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.
+
+The approved style was white plaster, a story and a half high, with an
+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 Corazón 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 cafés: 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 Cabañas 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 Marío Turafa, his friend, in hiding, to the Spanish Government.
+It was said that Marío 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 Andalucía!
+     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 mediæval 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. Lainé 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.
+
+An extremely bad period, that, when I tried to write without knowledge
+or support, reaching from twenty until well after thirty, when I managed
+to sell a scrap of prose. From then until forty the time had gone in a
+flash, a scratching of the pen: it seemed incredible that the seven
+books on a shelf bearing my name had been the result of so brief, so
+immaterial, a time. Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba, gazing
+peacefully into the dim expensive space of a room in the Hotel
+Inglaterra, congratulating myself on the loss, the positive lapse, of
+what was called men's most valuable possession.
+
+No better place for the trying of my sincerity than Havana existed; no
+other city in the world could so perfectly create the illusion of
+complete irresponsibility, of happiness followed for its own sake, as an
+end, or as the means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and plazas and
+promenades, its alternating sparkle and languor, like flags whipping in
+the wind or drooping about their staffs, always conveyed a spirit of
+holiday and of a whole absence of splenetic censure. At the bottom of
+this the climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days and nights
+stirring with a breeze through the galleries, concentrated the mind and
+body on pleasure.
+
+Night had always been the time for gaiety, when the practical was veiled
+in shade; and Havana responded with an inimitable grace to the stars.
+It was constructed for night, like a lunar park of marble and palms and
+open flooding radiance; with, against that, streets packed with darkness
+and doors of mystery to which clung the faint breath of patchouli. The
+air was instinct with seduction, faintly touched by the pungency of Ron
+Bacardi and limes, and bland with the vapors of delightful cigars. The
+clothes, too--the white linens and flannels and silks of the men; the
+ruffled dresses on the balconies, the flowery laces, like white
+carnations, in the automobiles; the wide hats of Paris and the satin
+slippers tied about the ankles, with preposterous heels; the fluttering
+fans--all, all were in the key of light sharp emotion, of challenge and
+invitation and surrender.
+
+Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana, any philosophy in the face of
+that charm, was unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a farther
+development of this, tacitly left to my own devices and thoughts, as if
+there were a general perception of my remoteness from the affair in
+hand. I was suffered to come and go without notice; no one, much, spoke
+to me; even those not unaware of the possibility of a book, of San
+Cristóbal de la Habana, in which their city would find praise, were
+hardly stirred to interest. The moment to go to Havana was youth, the
+moment for masked balls and infidelity and champagne: its potency for me
+lay in its investment of memories; I regarded it as a spectacle set in
+the tropics. I was an onlooker and not a participant. But I had, as I
+have shown, no regret; I had become reconciled not only to the fleetness
+of time, but equally to the fact that my rôle was necessarily a
+spectator's. Hour after hour, year after year, I sat writing at the low
+window which looked out over my green terrace and clipped hedge, to the
+road, to life, beyond.
+
+Above everything, then, I was satisfied with the Havana I knew. From the
+standpoint of actuality my comprehension was limited--I was familiar
+with only a certain narrow part of the city, for it was my habit to go
+back to what I had found rather than discover the new--perhaps ten
+streets and a handful of houses, parks, and cafés. Too much to get into
+a score of books. What I had lost, I thought further--if, indeed, I had
+ever possessed it--was a warm personal contact such as I should have had
+dancing with a lovely girl. I never danced, but remained outside,
+philosophically, gazing at the long bright whirling rectangles.
+
+At the Inglaterra there were many men older than myself who danced
+persistently and had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too, wore
+flowers in their coats, but aggressive and not reminiscent blooms. They
+formed most of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't much youth
+among them, but I didn't envy them in the slightest. They were, if
+possible, more absurd than the women unmindful of thickening waists and
+dulled eyes. Their ardor was febrile and their power money; and every
+time they escorted with a quickened step their charmers past young dark
+men, the charmers glanced back appealingly. It was different with the
+Cubans, who regarded such things more naturally, and did not,
+practically, in consequence, get drunk.
+
+The noise from San Rafael Street never slackened, the clamor of the
+mule-drivers and the emptying cans of refuse took the place of the motor
+signals; the slats of my lowered shutters showed streaks of dawn. I
+turned once, it appeared, and the room was filled with indirect
+sunlight, the hands of my watch were at ten. It was eleven before I was
+dressed, with the morning cup of black coffee empty on a table; at
+twelve I had breakfast, and until five I idly read. The evening as well
+was idle--a thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvious and active
+standards. I thought, with no impulse to return, of the house near the
+Arsenal, which had, in effect, been open for centuries and which, unless
+life were purified, would never close. The purity I meant was not a
+limitation of passion, but its release from obscene confines. It didn't
+matter what I meant and, again, I was becoming too serious ... or not
+serious about the correct things. There was perpetually the danger of
+being overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early flight, by the
+influences, the promptings, of my heredity and strong first
+associations. What an amazing climax to my records of chiffon textures
+and moods of chiffon that would be: shouting the creed of a bitter Scots
+induration from the informal pulpits of the streets! Or I might publish,
+to the dismay of every one intimately concerned, a denunciatory
+sermonizing book. But what the subject was wouldn't matter, as it had
+not mattered with Jeremy Taylor, if it were written with sufficient
+beauty. Disagreeable books, too, in spite of the accepted contrary
+belief, were always very highly esteemed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was easy enough to account for Jeremy Taylor by the vague
+generalization of beauty, and I forced myself to a closer scrutiny of
+that term and my meaning. The words beauty and love, and a dozen others,
+like old shoes, had grown so shapeless through long mis-wear that they
+would stay on no foot. I tried to isolate some quality indisputably
+recognizable as beautiful and hit, to my surprise, on intellectual
+courage. The thought of an undeviating mental integrity was as
+exhilarating as the crash of massed marching bands. Then, searching for
+another example, I recalled August nights at Dower House, with the
+moonlight lying like water between the black shadows of the trees on the
+lawn. There was a harsh interwoven shrilling of locusts and the
+echo--almost the feel rather than the sound--of thunder below the
+horizon. This, too, stirred me profoundly, brought about the glow
+transmutable into creative effort.
+
+Another excursion found nothing but a boy and a girl, any boy and any
+girl, fired by shy uncomplicated passion.... A mental, a visual, and a
+natural incentive, each with the same effect, the identical pinching of
+the heart and thrust to a common hidden center. What had they each
+alike? Perhaps it was this: that they were the three great facts of
+existence, the primary earth, the act of creation, and the crowning
+dignity, the superiority of men who, somehow, had transvalued the sum of
+their awarded clay. Somehow! I had no intention of examining that. The
+fact was, for me, enough.
+
+There was, however, another phase of beauty still, one peculiarly the
+property of novelists, which had to do not with life at all, but with
+death, with vain longing and memories and failure. All the novels which
+seemed to me of the first rank were constructed from these latter
+qualities; and while painting and music and lyrical poetry were
+affirmative, the novel was negative, built, where it was great, from
+great indignations. Yet, while this was obvious truth, it failed to
+include or satisfy me; for there were many passages not recognizable as
+great in the broadest sense, both in literature and life, that filled me
+with supreme pleasure--there were pages of Turgenev spun out of the
+fragile melancholy of a girl, a girl with a soul in dusk, far more
+enthralling than, for example, Thomas Hardy. It may have been that there
+was the perception of a similitude between Turgenev's figure and myself;
+certainly I was closer to her mood, her disease of modernity, than to a
+sheep herder; and there was a possibility, for my own support, that the
+finest-drawn sensibilities, not regarded as emotions in the grand key,
+would turn out to be our most highly justified preoccupation.
+
+I was, at present, in Havana, submerged in its fascination, and when I
+came to write about it there would not be lacking those to say that I
+had been better occupied with simpler things. Hugh Walpole had warned me
+of the danger, to me, of parquetry and vermilion Chinese Chippendale;
+and I was certain that he would speak to me again in the same tone about
+idling in a mid-Victorian Pompeii, celebrating drink and marble touched
+by the gilder's brush of late afternoon. Perhaps Walpole--and Henry
+Mencken's keen friendly discernment--was right; but, damn it, my
+experience was deficient in material essentials; I was dangerously
+ignorant of current reality, and I doubted if my style was a suitable
+instrument for rugged facts.
+
+What remained for me, an accomplishment spacious enough for anyone, was
+the effort to realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm
+delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained
+in the face of imminent destruction. And in that category none was
+sharper than the charm of a woman, so soon to perish, in a vanity of
+array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly. The thought of such a
+woman, the essence, the distillation, of an art of life superimposed on
+sheer economy, was more moving to me than the most heroic maternity. I
+couldn't get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of
+staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten,
+was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat of some
+kitchen drudge.
+
+The setting of a woman in a dress by Cheruit; a part of the bravery of
+fragile soft paste Lowestoft china and square emeralds that would feed a
+starving village, on fingers that had done no more than wave a fan; the
+fan itself, on gold and ivory with tasselled silk--the things to which
+the longing of men, elevated a degree above hard circumstances,
+turned--were of equal weight with the whole; for it was not what the
+woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her
+difference. On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other
+æsthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter.
+
+This, however wide apart it may seem, was closely bound to my presence
+in Havana, to my delight and purpose there. It was nothing more than a
+statement, a development, if not a final vindication, of my instant
+sense of pleasure and familiarity--a place already alive in my
+imagination. My special difficulty was the casting of it into a
+recognizable, adequate medium. There, in the plaiting of cobwebs instead
+of hemp rope, I particularly invited disaster. It wasn't necessary that
+I should sustain anyone, but only that I should spread the illusion of
+the buried associations and image of a brain. That, if it were true, I
+held, would be beauty.
+
+Here, at least, I was serious about the correct things, direct rather
+than conventional; all that mattered was the spreading of the illusion,
+the spectacle of what part of Havana I did know interpreted, realized,
+not in the spirit of an architectural plan, but as sentient with
+reflected emotions. Otherwise the most weighty charges against me were
+absolutely justified. If I couldn't make Havana respond in the key of my
+intrinsic feelings, if I had no authentic feeling with which to invest
+it, my book, almost all my books, were a weariness and a mistake.
+
+Novels of indignation or of melancholy, of a longing for the continuity
+of individual passion confronted with the inevitable--it was that, the
+perishability of all that was desirable, which gave to small things, a
+flower in the hair, their importance as symbols. The love story, once
+the exclusive province of fiction, had disappeared; it was now
+practically impossible for the slightest talent to fill a book in that
+manner. The romantic figment, like a confection of spun sugar with a
+sprig of artificial orange blossoms, had been discarded; the beauty of
+love, it had been discovered, wasn't the possession of a particular
+heart, but the tenderness, the pity, that came from the realization of
+its inescapable loss. No man could love a woman, no woman could love a
+man, who was to live forever; a thousand years would be an insuperable
+burden. The higher a cultivation, a delight, reached, the more tragic
+was its breaking by death; the greater knowledge a mind held, the more
+humiliating was the illimitable ignorance, the profound night pressing
+in upon every feeble and temporary human lamp.
+
+Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write, were composed, now, not so
+much from among the brasses, the tympani, as from the violins. The great
+majority, like the great books, were dedicated to the primary chords;
+but my reaching the former had been always hopeless. I didn't mind this,
+for I told myself that, while the structure of approbation I had
+gathered was comparatively modest, its stones and masonry were
+admirable; it was, if not a mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on
+earth--what was in England called, I believe, a freehold. It was mine,
+and there was no lease dependent on the good will--or on my
+subserviency--of any landlord.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of this went through my mind as I sat looking at my trunk, open on
+end in an alcove near the door, for I was gathering my clothes and
+thoughts in preparation for leaving Havana. One thing only that I wished
+to see now remained--the danzon at the National Theatre. I kept out a
+dark suit, one that would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's box;
+for I had been told that it was desirable to avoid unnecessary
+attention. There was, briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted--I
+had heard the same thing so often before without subsequent
+justification--but I could believe it possible if there was any violent
+discharge of primitive emotion. Here the spirit of Africa burned remote
+and pale, but it was still a tropical incomprehensible flame.
+
+A strip of red carpet led from the outer steps, across a large
+promenade, to the circular wall of the theatre; and though it was past
+eleven, the ball hadn't yet assumed an appearance of life. But just
+within the entrance a negro band began suddenly to play, and in the
+music alone I immediately found the potent actuality of danger. I was
+without the knowledge necessary to the disentangling of its elements:
+there were fiddles and horns and unnatural kettle drums, and an
+instrument made from a long gourd, with a parallel scoring for the
+scrape of a stick. The music was first a shock, then an exasperation
+hardly to be borne, but finally it assumed a rhythm maddening beyond
+measure.
+
+It was Africa and something else--notes taken from the Moors, splitting
+quavers of Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that might have been
+the agonized voice of the first Cubeños; with an unspeakable distortion,
+a crazy adaptation, of scraps of to-day. There was no pause, no
+beginning or end, in its form; it went on and on and on, rising and
+falling, fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and then a blasting
+discord--the savage naked utterance of a naked savage lust; it was a
+music not of passion, but of the frenzy of rape. Nothing like it would
+have been possible in writing, allowed in painting; only music was free
+to express, to sound, such depths. Nothing but music could have conveyed
+the inarticulate cries of the stirred mire that flooded the marble space
+of the opera house. It had lost the simplicity of its appropriate years,
+the spring orgies in the clearings of early forests; time had made it
+hideously menacing, cynical, and corrupt.
+
+At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro woman with a wheedling tainted
+manner tried to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger and pale,
+their faces coated with rice powder, went past in dragging satins. They
+were chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened cheeks and
+dead-looking mat-like hair, their coffee-colored breasts and white kid
+gloves, gave them an extraordinary incongruity; and behind them, as
+sharp as the whisper of their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered.
+Leaning forward on the rail of my enclosure, I gazed down over the
+floored expanse of the auditorium:
+
+The stage was set with the backdrop and wings of a conventional operatic
+design--a scene that would have served equally Aïda or La Favorita: it
+towered, like a faded dream of pseudo-classic Havana, into the
+theatrical heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and charcoal grey, of
+loggias and peristyles and fountains; while in close order about its
+three sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live border of dancers.
+They were of every color from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster,
+to utter blackness. The men, for the most part, were light, some purely
+Spanish, the negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I could see no
+indisputably white women. There was a girl in a mantone of bright
+contrasting colors, a high comb and a rose in her hair, about whom there
+was a question. However, her partner was one of the few full negroes
+there; and, as they revolved below my box, it seemed that her skin had a
+leaden cast.
+
+The danzon itself had, at first, the appearance of a sustained gravity:
+it was danced slowly, in very small space, following the music with
+arbitrary reverses, and pausing. There might have been, to the
+superficial view, a restraint almost approaching dignity had the dancers
+been other. The men, without exception, wore their stiff straw hats and
+smoked cigars through every evolution; and the dresses, the dressing, of
+the women were fantastic: a small wasted girl, dryly black, had copied
+the color and petals of a sunflower. As she revolved, her skirt flared
+out from legs like bent bones, and a hat of raw yellow flapped across
+her grotesque ebony countenance.
+
+The danzon, for a moment, in spite of the music played continuously and
+alternately by two orchestras occupying a box on either side of the
+stage, seemed formal. Then, abruptly, a couple lost every restraint, and
+their maddened spinning and furious hips tore the illusion to shreds.
+And slowly I began to be conscious of a poisonous air, a fetid air as
+palpable as the odors and scents--the breath, the premonition, of the
+danger of which I had been warned. It lay in an ugly hysteria of rasped
+emotions that at any illogical accident might burst into the shrillness
+of a knife. It wasn't dangerous so much as it was abjectly wicked--the
+deliberate calling up of sooty shapes that had better be kept buried. It
+was unimportant that the men below me were, in the daytime, commonplace
+clerks; the women could be anything chance had made them: here, to the
+spoiled magic of Carabalíe nights, they were evoking a ceremonial of
+horror.
+
+Personally, since I had no hopes to save or plans to protect, I hadn't
+the desire, like Sampson, to pull down the pillars of the roof on their
+debased heads. I enjoyed it remarkably; the more because I saw,
+scattered among the crowd, figures of unreal and detrimental beauty--a
+creamy magnificence in creamy satin with a silver band on her forehead;
+a yellow creature with oblique eyes in twenty white flounces and a
+natural garland of purple flowers; a thing of ink, of basalt carved by
+an opulent chisel, on whose body clothes were incidental; and corrupt
+graces perfect in youth and figure weaving the patterns, the wisdom, of
+Sodom.
+
+One o'clock passed, then two and three, but there was no abatement in
+the danzon. A middle-aged man, with an abstracted air, danced without
+stopping for an hour and fifty minutes. His partner, flushing through
+her dark skin, was expensively habited: her fingers and throat glittered
+coldly with diamonds and her hat was swept with long dipping plumes. She
+had a malignant mouth and eyes a thick muddy brown, and it was clear
+that she hated the man in whose arms she was turning. I wondered about
+her hatred and the patience, the indifference, of the other: how
+revolting she would be in a few hours, livid and ghastly in the morning.
+He, probably, would then be standing at a high desk, counting dollars
+with integrity or adding columns of figures, precise and respectable in
+an alpaca coat. An older man still was dancing by himself, intent on the
+intricate stepping of his own feet. His agility soon won an admiring
+circle, and his violence increased with the applause: he jumped in the
+air, clapping his heels together, and his arms waved wildly--a
+marionette pulled convulsively by wires in strange merciless hands.
+
+I imagined a fetish, a large god, on the stage, drooping over his
+swollen belly, with a hanging lip and hands set in his loins. His legs
+were folded, lost in flesh ... a squatting smeared trunk of hideous
+service. Around him were the seated rows of worshippers, on either hand
+was his jangling praise; and before him revolved the dancers in his
+rite. The music throbbed in my brain like a madness that would have
+dragged me down to the floor. I speculated fleetly over such a
+surrender, the drop, through countless ages, of that possible descent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was, however, only just to add that the idol of Guinea suffered
+unduly from his surroundings and the age in which he was exposed; in his
+place, his time, he had been neither a monster nor unnatural, but
+nothing more than the current form of worship. He, Bongó, had had the
+misfortune to be catapulted, together with his congregation, through
+twenty, forty, centuries, in a breath, on the magic carpet of greed, and
+put down in a day where he was not only obsolete, but repudiated. Men
+saw him with the sense of horror generated by a blasting view of their
+own very much earlier selves. For the difference between the negro, the
+Carabalíes, or Macua, and the Spaniards of the sixteenth century in Cuba
+was, at heart, historical in time only. They were members--we were all
+members--of one family. The innocence of a bare black, torn like a
+creeper from the support of his native tree, tatooed with necessary
+charms, medicines, against jungle fears and fevers, had more to dread
+from Amador de Lares than any later Christians owed to an arbitrarily
+imported savagery. What, in reality, occurred, was implied on the wide
+floor of the opera house, was that the negroes, unable to change their
+simplicity as easily as they superficially diluted their skins, kept
+their innocent habits, their tastes in noise and religion and
+misconduct; but, in the dress of civilization, these took on the aspect
+of a grotesque defiled horror. With this, too, in an earnest effort to
+assimilate as much as possible of their enforced land, they caught such
+bright fragments of life as struck them--the glass beads and bits of gay
+cloth--and copied them prodigiously. The confusion which followed was a
+tragedy in the comic spirit--a discordant mingling that provoked
+laughter, quickly stopped by a deeper understanding and by pity. The
+past vital still: with the entrance of the African slave into the West,
+it was exactly as though a figure in the paint and feathers of voodoo
+had been thrust into a polite salon.
+
+The spectacle had none of the comfortable features of a mere exhibition;
+for the revulsion came from a spiritual shudder in the beings of the
+onlookers; while the other injured individuals saw that, as clothes, the
+crude partial imitation of a rooster was insufficient. They, the latter,
+commendably hurried into trousers and pot hats, into satin trains and
+pink tulle and white kid gloves; but the transition was too hurried, too
+optimistic, and the resulting incongruity ... I was not a student of
+ethnology, I had no theory of races, but, gazing down from my box, it
+seemed to me that yesterday could not be instantly combined with to-day;
+it was evident that there was no short way by a long and painful
+business of evolution.
+
+Nothing more unfortunate could well be imagined; for, in the retributive
+manner I had already mentioned, the Africa buried in the West, so long
+forgotten, took life again, and the danger to everyone had been acute
+through a long period of Havana's years. We, in temperate zones, in
+weathers that had no need of the protection of a special dark pigment,
+had been lucky; but we were trying our luck very severely by subjecting
+it to the old potencies not yet entirely lost. The danzon was, actually,
+in a way beyond legislation, a masked ball in black and white, where the
+unmasking was involuntary and fateful.
+
+One, I thought, spoiled the other, like an incomplete experiment in
+chemistry where nothing but an opaque liquid and an intolerable stench
+was evolved. Perhaps, with acute necessity, a successful clear result
+would reward the future with peace; but it wouldn't happen in my
+knowledge; I hadn't a thing in the world to do with it. What occurred to
+me then was the useful fact that the present scene afforded the right,
+the only, ending for my story, The Bright Shawl. It would have to be
+tragic, but only indirectly; nothing, I had decided, should happen to my
+principal character beyond a young moment of supreme romance. No, the
+mishap, death, must envelop his friend, the patriotic Cuban. He'd be
+killed by a Spanish officer, through a woman--a woman in the bright
+shawl of the dancer that had been preserved as a memento of tender
+regard.
+
+Some arrangement was necessary, perhaps a prostitute. Well--I had seen
+her, in virginal white muslin, with the weight of her head, its oval
+flattened by the hand of China, her heavy hair, inclined on its slender
+neck: a figure, in my pages, impassively fateful, remote as I had seen
+her seated in a gay company. That finished the story, for the youthful
+American, after a vain public effort to secure for himself the dignity
+of a heroic end, would be ignominiously deported from Cuba. I had been
+often asked how I arrived at my plots, but more often accused of never
+reaching an intelligible plan, and, until now, I'd been incapable of
+giving an explanation satisfactory even to myself; but here was one
+accounted for to a considerable degree. It had begun by an instinctive
+attachment to a city, to Havana; and the emotions brought into being had
+crystallized into a plan, for me, unusually concise.
+
+There was a temptation, to be avoided, to tell it in the first person; a
+version that had come to be disliked almost as universally as a set of
+letters. Some celebrated stories had been written that way--Youth--but I
+felt that it was an unnecessary charge on sympathy. While the creation
+of character was no longer the tyrant it had been, a certain air of
+veracity was most desirable, and the limited scope of a single
+intelligence discussing, explaining, himself was too marked. The great
+trouble with the romantic novels up to the very present had been that
+there was never a doubt of the ultimate happiness of all who should be
+happy and the overwhelming misery of those who should be miserable. No
+peril was the father of a thrill, because from its inception it was
+plainly impotent to harm the lovely and the brave. The pleasure had from
+witnessing a dexterous job was lost in an artifice that seldom
+approached an art. But we'd improved that, an improvement expressed in
+the utter loss of the word hero; no man, or woman, was now entirely safe
+in the hands of his romantic author; the two manners had come creditably
+together.
+
+I had become, subconsciously, interested in a girl pausing on the floor,
+and, in response to my scrutiny, she glanced up with a shadowy smile. I
+gazed with instant celerity and fixedness at the ceiling, then at the
+upper boxes opposite, since below, indiscretion was laid like a trail of
+powder, of explosive rice powder. There was no cutting in at that ball.
+She was more than charming, too, with her mixed blood evident in her
+carriage, her indolence, rather than in feature. She wore blue, a wisely
+simple dress that showed small feet, like butterflies in their
+lightness, and the instinctive note of a narrow black velvet band on her
+throat.
+
+An air of sadness rested on her, on, principally, a superiority anyone
+could see. Her fan opened and shut in a thin pointed hand. A maid, I
+told myself, reflecting the aristocracy of the closets of delicate
+clothes in her charge, scented from the gold-stoppered bottles of her
+mistress. She was another phase of what had been going on at such length
+through my mind--a different catastrophe, since she was denied the
+reward of the virtues in either of the races that had made her. In
+Boston she would have become a bluestocking, a poet singing in minor
+cadence to traditional abolitionists become dilettantes, but in Cuba,
+tormented by the strains of the danzon:
+
+There, her flax burning in resentment and despair, she might be
+extinguished in the tide restlessly sweeping to the troubled coast of
+Birrajos: or, at Havana, carried into the secrets of the Ñañigos: in the
+black cabildo of that society, provision was made for a woman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was significant that the first organization of ñañiguismo in Cuba was
+purely African, for the hatred of its members, Carabalíes, for the white
+race made the admission of even mulattos impossible. This
+society--tierra or juego--was formed during the administration of
+General Tacón, in the village of Regla, and called Apapá Efí. It was,
+against the protests of its originators at sharing the secret with too
+many, enlarged, and spread through the outskirts of Havana. There the
+mulattos greatly outnumbered the blacks, and they formed a society of
+their own, its oath sworn in Ancha del Norte Street, named Ecobio Efó
+Macarará. They insisted on a common brotherhood and their right of
+entering the fambás, the ceremonial rooms; but there was a determined
+opposition, open battle and murder in Perserverancia and Lagunas
+Streets. After this there was a general meeting at Marianao, the early
+bar to color, as distinguished from black, removed, and the infusion of
+the dark ritual of Efi into white blood began. When, ten years after, an
+indiscriminate society, the Ecobio Efó, was terminated by the
+authorities, Spanish nobles and professional men were assisting in the
+rites.
+
+What had started upon the African river Oldan as a tribal religion took
+on, in Havana, a debased version of Rome, and the veneration of Santa
+Barbara was added to the supreme worship of Ecue, a figure vaguely
+parallel to the Holy Ghost, created in the sounding of a sacred drum.
+And what, equally, in the Carabalíe Bricamó was Dibó, God, became in
+Cuba an organization of criminals and finally, when its more obvious
+aspects were stamped out, a corrupt political influence. There, in the
+clearest possible manner, was traced the eventual effect of so much
+heralded superiority, such enormous advantages, on native belief.
+
+There could be no doubt, though, of the fact that, in any pretence of
+civilization, the ñañigos were detrimental; it was unavoidable that they
+should have degenerated into a savage menace, not only in overt acts,
+which were not lacking, but in practices of mental and emotional horror.
+Their ceremony, with its strange vocables and distortions of meaning;
+the obscene words that were but symbols for obscenities beyond
+imagination; the character of their dance, which gave them the name
+arrastrados, men who dragged themselves, reptilian, on the ground--all
+combined in a poison like a gas sweeping from the morass of the past. It
+held, beneath its refuge and defiance of society, the appeal of a
+portentous secret, bound in blood, the fascination, the fetishism, of
+orgiastic rituals, and, under that, stronger still, delirious barbarity.
+
+Its legend was not different from the others which formed the primitive
+bases of subsequent elaborate beliefs: the miracle, with an attending
+baptism, was consummated by a woman, Sicanecua, who found a crying
+fish--the fish was a sacred Christian sign--in her jar of water. In
+recognition of this she was sacrificed and her blood put to a holy use,
+and the fish skinned for the drum, sounded by the fingers, used in his
+praise. Here Ecue, the divine, was baptized by Efó in the Oldan, who in
+turn signed his disciple. And about that tradition, guarded--with its
+instrument--in the altar, Ecue sese, the degenerate elements and
+characters of modern ñañíguismo gathered. There were, necessarily,
+changes in the Cuban form of worship--the skin of a goat was substituted
+for the unprocurable variety of fish, and the timbre of the original
+drum secured by an artifice. The need, as well, of finding another
+anointment than human blood, difficult to procure in Havana, led to the
+sacrifice of the rooster or a goat. This, now, had a crucifix, with the
+profession that God, Dibó, must be over everything, and a sacramental
+singing; but not the Te Deum or Laudes ... Efore sisí llamba, and the
+reply Ho Isueribó éngomo ... Mocongo! while the Empegó, the clerk of
+the service, shifted brightly colored curtains and enveloping
+handkerchiefs and marked with yellow chalk the head and body and palms
+of the initiates.
+
+A diablito had in charge the offices of the catechism--Come with me;
+where did you leave your feet; where I left my head! Enter where Bongó
+is and cry with your brother! Look at your brother because they want to
+choke him. He conducted the sacrifice of the goat, which, in a memorial
+of Guinea, was eaten with pointed sticks, with the drink Mucuba, made
+from sugar-cane rum and bitter broom. A strange procession followed, led
+by the Insué, with a woman in a shift, Sicanecue, and the diablito
+skipping backward. The sese, a silver crucifix with four black feathers,
+was carried, and later the remains of the feast were thrown into a
+cemetery.
+
+The effort to end ñañiguismo in Havana began in eighteen hundred and
+seventy-five, when its gatherings were forbidden; but, deeply
+traditional, it flourished in hidden places, in the jail where ñañigos
+were confined and the cellars of Jesús María. Long before that the poet
+Placido had been killed; within a few years the Llamba named Hand on the
+Ground was judicially executed; and following the assassinations during
+the carnival of eighteen hundred and sixty-five, sweeping deportations
+were enforced. In Maloja Street a juego, Acaniran Efó Primero, with
+officers drawn from reputable quarters, was surprised; the next year the
+Abacuá Efó was exterminated; a public clash of diablitos resulted in
+apprehensions; and twenty-five ñañigos were taken on Vista Hermosa
+Street.
+
+It was, in reality, Africa in Havana, brought against its wish and to
+its tragic misfortune; and, planted in an alien soil, but among a common
+genus, the mysteries of religion, it grew into an aberration of all that
+gave it birth. Aside from this, its significance, for me, lay in its
+amazing language, an idiom, specifically, composed of the Carabalíe
+Bricamó and a Spanish without articles or conjunctions, equally
+incapable of exact images and the expression of abstract thought. But
+taking the place of its omissions, was a congealing power of suggestion,
+of creating, through, apparently, no more than the jumbling of common
+terms and sounds, sensations of abject dread. The four bishops of the
+ritual, in their order, were Insué, Illamba, Mocongo, Empegó. In
+ñañiguismo man was momban, an idiot was sansgueré, a knife icuá
+rebesine, a pistol etombre, immortality embigüí, the night erufie, war
+ochangana, the sun fansón, and worms cocorico. The language took short
+rigid forms, phrases; it had little if any plasticity: Amandido
+amanllurube, The day goes and the night comes. Efiquefi que buton efique
+Ename onton Ellego Efimeremo Iboito, Eurico sangacurici eurico sanga
+quimagua sanga ñampé, ñampé sanga mariba, The owl drinks the blood of
+the dead and flies to the sea.
+
+The terms of the acts of worship were particularly heavy, sultry, and
+held in their sound alone the oppressive significance of fetishes as
+black as the night from which they were shaped. The minister of death
+to Sinanecua, a ceremony which became traditional, was named
+Cuañon-Araferrobré, and the act of sacrifice the Acuá Meropó. The
+singers before the altar, making visible the sacred stick, Bastón
+Mocongo, intoned Mocongo Machevere, Mosongo moto cumbaba eribo, and
+Erendio basi Bome, I believe in God and God is great; with, at the last,
+silencing the profession of faith, the voice of the drum, tarinibongó.
+
+The ñañigos had been driven from the streets through which, at first, on
+King's Day, Dia Reyes, they were permitted, once a year, to parade with
+native costumes and instruments--atables and marugas and ecous, a
+flattened bell struck by a thin stick. Their fambás were destroyed and
+hysteria cooled; but I wondered about both the secretiveness and the
+persistence of the primitive spirit and the delicate melancholy that
+veiled the girl so faintly tinged with carabalíe, resting below my box
+through the rasping strains of the danzon. Had her gain been greater
+than the loss, the ruin, of her simplicity; had she, dragged abruptly
+from saurian shadows, been made white by an arbitrary papal sun?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A glimmering dawn, faintly salt with the presence of the sea, was
+evident in the Parque Central when I walked the short distance, not more
+than a few steps, from the opera house to the Inglaterra, my head filled
+with the resonant bos and bongos of ñañiguismo. Havana, for a moment,
+seemed like a cemetery--its own marble cemetery of Colon--where a black
+spirit, buried in a secret grave, walked and would not be still. I
+speculated about that same spirit in another connection--in its
+influence on painting and music, on Western literature. It had affected
+dancing profoundly, making it, in the United States, almost wholly its
+own; and the Spanish, with whom, in the richness of a tradition and
+perfect expression, no others could compete, owed a great debt to
+Africa. Our music, too, it had influenced to such a degree that it was
+doubtful if we had any outside the beat of negro strains.
+
+Stephen Foster, a great composer in that he had enclosed the whole
+sentiment of an age within his medium, was often but a paraphrase of a
+darker melody. Foster, like Havana, was Victorian, a period that dreamed
+of marble halls, set in a pitch impossible now, and yet, curiously,
+charged for an unsympathetic world with significant beauty. This negro
+contribution was in a melancholy and minor key, the invariable tone of
+all primitive song; in poetry, as well, a lyrical poetry nearly
+approaching music, there was an analogous coloring between the race and
+its shadowed measures.
+
+The reminiscent emotions that, with us, were mainly personal, in the
+negro were tribal; he had not been individualized, brought to a separate
+consciousness; and, in consequence, his song, practically lacking in
+intellect, dealt only with instinctive feelings. Growing shrill with
+passion and sinking to the monotonous laments of formless sorrow, it
+belonged equally to all the men, the women, who heard it--it was their
+voice and comprehensible triumph or pain; without artifice it wasn't
+artificial nor ever insincere; and, as a means of gold, a medium for
+lies, it had no existence. The voice of all, an instrument of natural
+beauty, shared by villages, its pure quality, brought in slave ships
+that rotted with their dead on the sea, gave the shallow and vitiated
+West a fresh earthen tonic chord.
+
+The negro, naturally, hadn't grown more cheerful in his new imposed
+setting; and it was possible that his music had gained an added depth,
+at any rate for our perception, from the weight of banishment and
+shackles. He had not turned with any success to creative accomplishment
+that needed mental independence and courage, or to forms, like the
+novel, wholly modern. On the other side, the novel, with all its
+trumpeted young freedom, had never, with even relative truth, expressed
+the negro in the Americas. This, a subject of appalling splendor, had,
+in the United States, been turned over to the comic spirit and short
+impressions--stories, superficially, falsely, pathetic. The fact was
+that we had enormously harmed the negro, and for that reason, in the
+familiar process of human self-esteem, nationally we were uneasy,
+resentful in his presence. We saw him, when we escaped from absolute
+hatred, as a figure, a subject, without dignity: we lacked there the
+penetrative sympathy which was the soul of imaginative fiction. Such a
+novel, I thought, was perhaps of everything that offered the best worth
+writing.
+
+Certainly nothing more difficult could be well attempted; my knowledge,
+in Havana and through the ñañigos, had been perceptibly enlarged, and I
+was not unfamiliar with the state in which, I decided, the story must be
+laid--not in Virginia, but upon a level grey reach of Louisiana, cut by
+tideless bayous and saturated with the fever of cane and cypress brakes.
+A bitter novel like the broom herb put in the ceremonial drink Mucuba,
+pages from which it would be hard to exclude a fury of hopelessness! And
+what an angry disturbed wasplike hum it would provoke! No magazine, of
+course, would touch it--it would be sold, for a week or ten days, from
+under counters, and then we, my novel and myself, metaphorically burned.
+A magnificent project:
+
+A huddle of cabins at the edge of a wall of black pines beyond a deep
+ruined field--but perhaps this was South Carolina--infinitesimal ragged
+patches of corn, a sandy trail lost abruptly in the close forest, and
+half-naked portentous shapes. There would be a town back in the country
+with a desolate red square of great sprawling water-oaks smothered in
+hanging moss, a place at once old and raw, and ugly with vindictive
+ignorance.... The negroes were infinitely happier in Havana, where the
+heat, the palms, were their own; and I was surprised that they didn't
+desert the United States in a body for a suaver spirit in the air and
+man. Cuba, to a large measure, with what final result I wasn't
+concerned, had absorbed them in the manner that Spain had absorbed the
+Moors. Havana made some denial of this, and prided itself, with entire
+justice where it was true, on unmixed Castilian blood; but the other was
+perceptible in the gait, the very whiteness, of Cuba's principal
+city--the whitest walls on earth. This didn't bother me; I liked Havana
+from its farthest view to its most intimate façade, and I was grateful
+to whatever had made it.
+
+In my room the negro, with the danzon, faded from my mind; and I only
+paused to speculate dimly about his overwhelming preference, where a
+choice existed, for the Protestant religions instead of Roman
+Catholicism. I should have thought that the color, the imagery and
+incense, of the Catholic Church would be irresistible. Yet there were,
+in the United States, thousands of colored Methodists and Baptists for
+one adherent of Rome. It might be that the hymns of Methodism,
+sufficiently melancholy and barbarous in figure, God knew, were the
+reason--the character of the hymns and congregational singing, the loud
+pictorial shouts. The later religion of the negroes, in addition to what
+I had already considered, was a subject to be avoided; but running
+through my mind was the memory that in Richmond, not long ago, it was
+common in the evenings of spring for bands of negroes to go through the
+streets singing spirituals and constantly gathering others who dropped
+their work, their responsibilities, to join the passing chorus of hope.
+
+That was lost now, I understood, a vanished custom, killed by
+self-consciousness; but it would have been a fine thing to hear
+approaching and receding through the dusk, a stirring resinous volume or
+a mere vibrant echo, a dying whisper. Perhaps that, a dying whisper,
+would be the solving of the whole tragic difficulty--disease and winter
+and relentless natural laws. The latter moved with great deliberation
+through unlimited centuries, but the impatience of men demanded instant
+release from trouble. They wanted black black and white white, with no
+transition, no blurring of the edges; this was their dream, but they
+constantly defeated it, betrayed their ideal. Yes, it might be that the
+humility of that defeat, in the far future, would accomplish a
+universally white city. Only one other way offered: a different humanity
+from any which had yet appeared outside rare individuals ... but that
+vision seemed, to me, as fantastic as the sentence in Carabalíe Bricamó
+that gave it expression, Eruco en llenison comunbairán abasí otete
+alleri pongó--We of this world are all together. The truth was, honestly
+at heart, that I couldn't commit myself to all, or even a quarter, of
+what this would have demanded. Impersonally I was able to see that, as
+an idea, it was superb, I realized that something of it must inform my
+pages; but it was useless to pretend that I could begin to carry it out
+or that I was, in practice, a Christian. I was tired, and my thoughts
+grew confused, but dimly in my mind was again the consciousness of the
+remote fate of the creative writer, an individual without even the
+desire to be a part of that for which he cried.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Certainly I had no marked love of humanity the following morning, caught
+with a small mob in a narrow passage of the wharf where I was waiting to
+board the steamer for Key West. I was between the water and a wooden
+partition, the heat was savage, and a number of youthful marines,
+returning home from Camagüey, were indulging in a characteristic
+humor--the dealing of unsuspected blows, of jarring force, among
+themselves. They shoved each other, in a crowd shoulder to shoulder,
+disregarding entirely the indirect results of their vigor, and exchanged
+threats of fulminating violence. They were not more annoying than the
+others, but only more evident; and, as the advertised time of departure
+was past by an hour, and then a second hour, and the sun found its way
+into our walled space, even the marines subsided. Every trace of
+dignity, in that heat, ran away from the people about me. While, on the
+whole, they were uncomplaining, even relatively considerate of others'
+discomforts, wondering, with weary smiles, when the boat would be off,
+I had no such kindly promptings.... I hated them all, the ugliness of
+the women and the men's dull or merely sharp faces, with an intensity
+that wasn't normal. When I was very young indeed, scarcely past two, I
+had been nearly crushed in a throng after the Sesquicentennial parade in
+Philadelphia; long afterward I had been, to all practical purposes,
+asphyxiated in a train that broke down in an Apennine tunnel; as a
+result, I had an unreasoning fear of crowded bodies or limited space;
+and this dread, before long, on the Havana wharf, turned into an acute
+aversion for every individual and thing about me.
+
+The surrounding insistent good nature developed in flashes of exchanged
+homely wit, varied by the attitudes of restraint, and, of them both, I
+couldn't tell which I resented more. The present position of the waiting
+people, the long exposure to the intolerable sun, was the result of
+their patience; of that and their personal inefficiency reflected in
+their official management. All the bad governments in the world, the
+dishonesty and universal muddles, were nothing more than monuments to
+the immeasurable stupidity and greed of the people; they were betrayed
+politically not by powerful and unscrupulous parties and men, but by
+themselves; perpetually and always by their own laziness and
+superstition and jealousy.
+
+The Cubeños, the original inhabitants of Cuba, were parcelled in the
+bondage of encomiendas, exterminated by the passion of the Spanish Crown
+for gold; when they had been sacrificed, Africa was raked by slavers for
+labor in the mines and planting; beneath every movement, instigated by
+hope or supported by returns, riches were the incentive and power. Men
+had never, within history and their secret hearts, cared for anything
+else: an ineradicable desire. There was a facile public gabble about the
+qualities of the spirit, about soul; but the solid fact of money, both
+as an abstraction and what conspicuously it brought, was what the people
+worshipped, wanted, what they schemed or stole for, or in the service
+of which they performed the most heroic toil.
+
+This was not, necessarily, an ignoble or negligible pursuit, but it was
+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 preëminently 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 Malecón; 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 Café 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 Larrañaga 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 Villafañe. 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 Careñas, 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 ñañigos--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 Tacón!
+
+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 Cristóbal de la Habana, by Joseph Hergesheimer
+
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+  The Project Gutenberg eBook of San Cristóbal de la Habana, by Joseph Hergesheimer.
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+
+Project Gutenberg's San Cristóbal de la Habana, by Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: San Cristóbal de la Habana
+
+Author: Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+Release Date: December 30, 2011 [EBook #38445]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA HABANA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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+</pre>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p><a name="page_001" id="page_001"></a></p>
+
+<p class="r">
+SAN CRISTÓBAL<br />
+DE&nbsp; LA&nbsp;  HABANA</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter">
+<a href="images/cover_lg.jpg">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="345" height="550" alt="image of the book&#39;s cover" title="image of the book&#39;s cover" /></a>
+</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a></p>
+
+<div class="msl">
+<p class="c">
+<i>THE WORKS OF<br />
+JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER</i></p>
+
+<p class="c"><i>NOVELS</i></p>
+
+<ul><li>THE LAY ANTHONY [<small>1914</small>]</li>
+<li>MOUNTAIN BLOOD [<small>1915</small>]</li>
+<li>THE THREE BLACK PENNYS [<small>1917</small>]</li>
+<li>JAVA HEAD [<small>1918</small>]</li>
+<li>LINDA CONDON [<small>1919</small>]</li></ul>
+
+<p class="c"><i>SHORTER STORIES</i></p>
+
+<ul><li>GOLD AND IRON [<small>1918</small>]</li>
+<li>THE HAPPY END [<small>1919</small>]</li></ul>
+
+<p class="c"><i>TRAVEL</i></p>
+
+<ul><li>SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA HABANA</li></ul>
+
+<p class="c"><i>Published&nbsp;  in &nbsp;New&nbsp;  York&nbsp;  by<br />
+A L F R E D &nbsp; A.&nbsp;  K N O P F<br />
+and for sale at all bookshops</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a></p>
+
+<h1>SAN CRISTÓBAL<br />
+DE LA HABANA</h1>
+
+<h2>BY<br />
+JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER</h2>
+
+<div class="block">
+<p class="nind">
+"<i><b>Many yeeres since I had knowledge by<br />
+relation of that great and golden Citie<br />
+which the Spaniards call El Dorado.</b></i>"<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 25%;"><i><b>Sir Walter Ralegh</b></i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cb"><br />
+<img src="images/colophon.png"
+width="130"
+height="80"
+alt="colophon"
+title="colophon"
+/><br />
+<br />
+NEW YORK<br />
+ALFRED &middot; A &middot; KNOPF<br />
+1920</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a></p>
+
+<p class="cright">COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY<br />
+ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.<br />
+<br />
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="cb">
+        <i>To<br />
+<br />
+     H. J. B. BAIRD<br />
+<br />
+          An<br />
+        Havana<br />
+    which he is free<br />
+to decline in every particular<br />
+       save the<br />
+     dedication</i></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a></p>
+
+<p class="rt">
+SAN CRISTÓBAL<br />
+DE&nbsp; LA&nbsp;  HABANA</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a></p>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HERE are certain cities, strange to the
+first view, nearer the heart than home.
+But it might be better to acknowledge
+that, perhaps, the word home has a wider and
+deeper significance than any mere geographical
+and family setting. Many men are alien
+in houses built from the traditions of their
+blood; the most inaccessible and obdurate
+parts of the earth have always been restlessly
+sought by individuals driven not so much by
+exterior pressure as by a strange necessity to
+inhabit a barren copper mountain, a fever
+coast, or follow to the end of life a river lost
+in a savage remoteness, hiding the secret of
+their unquenchable longing.</p>
+
+<p>Not this, precisely, happened to me, approaching
+Havana in the early morning, nothing
+so tyrannical and absolute; yet, watching
+the silver greenness of Cuba rising from the<a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a>
+blue sea, I had a premonition that what I saw
+was of peculiar importance to me. I grew at
+once impatient and sharply intent on the resolving
+of a nebulous, and verdant mass into
+the details of dense slopes, slopes that showed,
+from the sea to their crowns, no break in a
+dark foliage. The sombreness of the leaves
+immediately marked the land from an accustomed
+region of bright maples&mdash;they were at
+once dark, glossy, and heavy, an effect I had
+often tried to describe, and their presence in
+such utter expanses filled me with pleasure.
+It was exactly as though the smooth lustrous
+hills before me had been created out of
+an old mysterious desire to realize them in
+words.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly their effect belonged to the
+sea, the sky, and the hour in which they were
+set. The plane of the sea, ruffled by a wind
+like a willful and contrarily exerted force,
+was so blue that its color was lost in the dark
+intensity of tone; while the veils of space
+were dissolved in arcs of expanding light.
+The island seemed unusually solid and isolated,<a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a>
+as complete within itself as a flower
+in air, and saturated with romance. That was
+my immediate feeling about Cuba, taking
+on depth across water profounder than indigo ... it
+was latent with the emotional
+distinction which so signally stirred me to
+write.</p>
+
+<p>At once, in imagination, I saw the ineffable
+bay of Guatanago, where buccaneers careened
+their ships and, in a town of pink stucco and
+windows with projecting wooden grilles,
+drank and took for figureheads the sacred
+images of churches painted blue. On the
+shore, under a canopy of silk, a woman, naked
+but for a twist of bishop's purple, bound her
+hair in gold cloth. From where she stood, in
+dyed shadow, a figure only less golden than
+the cloth, she heard the hollow ring of the
+caulking malls and the harsh rustle of the
+palms. Drawing rapidly nearer to what was
+evidently the entrance to the harbor of Havana
+I considered the possibilities of such a
+story, such a character:</p>
+
+<p>She had her existence in the seventeenth<a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a>
+century, when Morgan marched inland to
+rape Camagüey&mdash;the daughter, without doubt,
+of a captain of the Armada de Barlevento, the
+Windward Fleet, and a native woman taken in
+violence; a shameless wench with primitive
+feelings enormously complicated by the heritage
+of Spain's civilization, a murderous, sullen,
+passionate jade, wholly treacherous and instinct
+with ferine curiosity. The master for
+her, I decided, must come from the Court of
+Charles, the London of the Cavalier Parliament,
+a gentleman in a gay foppery masking
+a steel eaten by a cruelty like a secret poison.
+It would be a story bright with the flames of
+hell and violent as a hurricane; the pages
+would reflect the glare of the sand scrawled
+with cocoanut palms, and banked with mangroves;
+and, at the end, the bishop's purple
+would be a cerecloth and the gallows chains
+sound in Xaymaca. But, above everything
+else, it would be modern in psychology and
+color treatment, written with that realism for
+which the only excuse was to provide a more
+exact verisimilitude for romance.<a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a></p>
+
+<p>The Cuban shore was now so close, Havana
+so imminent, that I lost my story in a new interest.
+I could see low against the water a
+line of white buildings, at that distance purely
+classic in implication. Then it was that I
+had my first premonition about the city toward
+which I was smoothly progressing&mdash;I
+was to find in it the classic spirit not of Greece
+but of a late period; it was the replica of those
+imagined cities painted and engraved in a
+wealth of marble cornices and set directly
+against the tranquil sea. There was already
+perceptible about it the air of unreality that
+marked the strand which saw the Embarkation
+for Cytherea.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could have made me happier than
+this realization; an extension of the impression
+of a haunting dream turned into solid
+fact. The buildings multiplied to the sight,
+bathed in a glamorous radiance; and, suddenly,
+on the other hand, rose Morro Castle.
+That structure, small and compact and remarkably
+like its numerous pictures, gave me
+a distinct feeling of disappointment. Its importance<a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a>
+was historic rather than visible, and
+needed, for appreciation, a different mind
+from mine. But the narrowness of the harbor
+entrance, a deep thrust of blue extending
+crookedly into the land, the sense of crowded
+shipping and massed city, the steamers of the
+world and broad shaded avenues at my elbow,
+impressed me at once with Havana's unique
+personality.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing, however, was more ingratiating
+than the long coraline limestone wall of the
+Cabañas on its sere abrupt hill at the left;
+ponderous and stained brilliantly pink by
+time, it formed a miraculous complement to
+the pseudo-classic whiteness below. A sea-wall
+built into a wide promenade followed the
+shore, there was a circular pavilion on a
+flagged plaza piled with iron chairs, the docks
+were interspersed with small public gardens
+under royal palms, and everywhere the high
+windows had ornamental balconies empty in
+the morning sun. I heard, then, the voice of
+Havana, a remarkably active staccato voice,
+never, I was to learn, sinking to quiet, but<a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a>
+changing at night into a different yet no less
+disturbing clamor.</p>
+
+<p>What I tried to discover, rushed through
+broad avenues and streets hardly more than
+passageways, was the special characteristic
+of a city which had already possessed me.
+And, ignorant of the instantaneous process
+that formed the words, I told myself that it
+was a mid-Victorian Pompeii. This was a
+modification of my first impression, a truer
+approximation, for it expressed the totality of
+marble façades inadmissible architecturally,
+yet together holding a surprising and pleasant
+unity. No one, I thought excitedly, had ever
+rightly appreciated Havana; it required a
+very involved understanding, a feeling not
+entirely admirable. No, it wasn't Hellenic,
+not what might be called in the first manner;
+it hadn't the simplicity of great spirit, a true
+epoch; Havana was artificial, exotic: Spain
+touched everywhere by the tropics, the tropics&mdash;without
+a tradition&mdash;built into a semblance
+of the baroque.</p>
+
+<p>It was rococo, and I liked it; an admission,<a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a>
+I believe, laying me open to certain charges;
+for the rococo was universally damned; the
+Victorian period had been equally condemned ... and
+I liked it. Why, God knew! Ornament
+without use, without reference to its
+surface and purpose, invited contempt. A
+woman in a hoop skirt was an absurdity; black
+walnut furniture carved and gilded beyond
+recognition, nonsense. Yet they had my warm
+attachment. Havana claimed me for its own&mdash;a
+city where I could sit at tables in the open
+and gaze at parterres of flowers and palms and
+statues and fountains, where, in the evening, a
+band played the light arias of La Belle
+Hélène.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>To illustrate further the perversity of my
+impulses: I was so entirely captivated by the
+Hotel Inglaterra that, for the rest of the day,
+I was indifferent to whatever might be waiting
+outside. The deep entrance with its reflected
+planes of subdued light and servants in
+cool linen; the patio with water, its white
+arches on iridescent tiles; the dining-room laid<a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a>
+in marble, panelled with the arms of Pontius
+Pilate, the bronze lustre of the tiling and the
+long windows on the Parque exactly as I had
+anticipated, together created the happy effect
+of a bizarre domain. The corridor on which
+my room opened was still more entrancing, its
+arches filled with green latticework, and an
+octagonal space set with chairs and long-bladed
+plants.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the room itself, perhaps one of the most
+remarkable rooms in the world, easily surpassed
+what, until then, I had seen. There
+were slatted door screens, cream-colored with
+a sapphire-blue glass knob, topped in an elaborate
+Gothic scrolling; and the door beyond,
+inconceivably tall, opened on an interior that
+seemed to reach upward without any limit.
+It had, of course, a ceiling, heavily beamed in
+dark wood; and when, later, I speculated
+carefully on its height, I reached the conclusion
+that it was twenty-five feet above the
+grey-flowered tiling of the floor. The walls
+were bare, white; about their base was laid a
+line of green glazed tiles; and this, except for<a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a>
+the glass above the French window, was the
+only positive note.</p>
+
+<p>The window, too, towered with the dignity
+of an impressive entrance; there were two sets
+of shutters, the inner elaborately slatted; and
+over it was a semi-circular fanlight of intensely
+brilliant colors&mdash;carmine and orange
+and plum-purple, cobalt and yellow. It was
+extraordinarily vivid, like heaped gorgeous
+fruit: throughout the day it dominated the
+closed elusive interior; and not only from its
+place on high, for the sun, moving across that
+exposure, cast its exact replica on the floor,
+over the frigidity of the austere iron bed,
+down one wall and up another.</p>
+
+<p>It was fascinating merely to sit and watch
+that chromatic splash, the violent color, shift
+with the afternoon, to surrender the mind to
+its suggestions.... They, as well, were singularly
+bright and illogical. Such glass,
+such colors, had been discarded from present
+decorative schemes; but I recalled hints of
+them in the houses of eighteen seventy; I
+seemed to remember them in pagoda-like conservatories,<a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a>
+and at once a memory of my childhood
+returned. Not that there were, actually,
+such windows at Woodnest, sombre under the
+tulip-poplars; yet the impression of one re-created
+the feeling of the other, it brought
+back disturbingly a vanished time with its
+figures long dead.</p>
+
+<p>Havana was identified as an authentic part
+of my inheritance. I was&mdash;in a purely inner
+manner&mdash;to understand it, to have for it the
+affectionate recognition, the sense of familiarity,
+of which I have already spoken. The city
+was wholly expressed by the fanlight sparkling
+with the shifting radiance of the blazing
+day. It was possible, without leaving the
+room, to grasp the essential spirit of a place
+so largely unseen. Then it occurred to me
+that, indeed, I had seen Havana, and that the
+wisest thing to do was to leave at once, to go
+back with my strong feeling uncontaminated
+by trivial facts; but a more commonplace impulse,
+a limiting materialism, pointed out
+that, since I had come away for a change of
+scene, I had best realize a semblance of my<a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a>
+intention. Still those colors, like a bouquet
+of translucent tulips, easily outweighed in importance
+all that I subsequently gained; they
+gave the emotional pitch, the intellectual note,
+of whatever followed&mdash;a mood, an entire existence,
+into which I walked with the turning
+of a sapphire-blue knob.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest the furniture was scant&mdash;a walnut
+bureau with a long mirror, necessary
+chairs, and an adequate bathroom like a shaft
+with shining silver faucets at its bottom.
+From outside, even through the heat of noon,
+the sustained activity of sound floated up
+through the shutters&mdash;the incomplete blending
+of harsh traffic alarms and blurred cries
+announcing newspapers.</p>
+
+<p>It was later when I went out on my balcony:
+across the narrow depth of San Rafael
+Street the ornamented bulk of the Gallego
+Club&mdash;the Club and the opera house in one&mdash;opposed
+a corner against the sweep of the
+Parque Central; and to the right, between the
+glitter of shop windows, poured an unbroken
+procession of motors. A great pillar of the<a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a>
+paseo below was hung with gaily covered
+magazines; a bootblack, wrinkled and active,
+with a single chair on a high stand, was cleaning
+a row of white shoes, obviously from the
+hotel; and the newsboys were calling La Politica
+Comica in a long-drawn minor inflection.</p>
+
+<p>The sun, that I had seen rising on the undiscovered
+hills of Cuba, was sinking behind
+the apprehended city; it touched the caryatids
+of the Gallego Club and enveloped, in a
+diminished gold like a fine suffusion of precious
+dust, the circular avenue, the royal
+palms, the flambeau trees and Indian laurels,
+of the plaza. The whiteness of the buildings,
+practically unbroken, everywhere took on the
+tone of every moment: now they were faintly
+aureate, as though they had been lightly
+touched by a gilder's brush; the diffused shadows
+were violet. The shadows slowly thickened
+and merged; they seemed to swell upward
+from the streets, the Parque; and the
+buildings, in turn, became lavender, and then,
+again, a glimmering white. Only the lifted<a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a>
+green of the palms was changeless, positive,
+until it was lost in darkness.</p>
+
+<p>A great many people appeared below, moving
+with an air of determination on definite
+ways. The faces of the men were darkened
+by the contrast of their linen; I couldn't see
+their features; but what struck me at once was
+the fact that there were, practically, no women
+along the streets. It was a tide of men.
+This, at first, gave me an impression of monotony,
+of stupidity&mdash;women were an absolute
+essential to the variety of any spectacle;
+and here, except for an occasional family
+group hurrying to a café, a rare stolid shape,
+they were utterly lacking.</p>
+
+<p>The reason, however, quickly followed the
+observed truth; this was, in spirit, Spain, and
+Spain was saturated with Morocco, a land
+where women, even the poorest, were never
+publicly exhibited. Havana was a city of
+balconies, of barred windows, of houses impenetrable,
+blank, to the streets, but open on
+the garden rooms of patios. And suddenly&mdash;while
+the moment before I had been impatient<a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a>
+at the bareness resulting from their absence&mdash;I
+was overwhelmingly conscious of the
+pervading influence of charming women.
+Here they were infinitely more appealing
+than in places where they were set out in the
+rows of a market, sometimes like flowers, but
+more often resembling turnips and squashes.
+Here, with extreme flattery, women were regarded
+as dangerous, as always desirable, and
+capable of folly.</p>
+
+<p>It was a society where a camellia caught in
+the hair, a brilliant glance across a powdered
+cheek, lace drawn over a vivid mouth, were
+not for nothing. In the world from which I
+had come these gestures, beauties, existed; but
+they were general, and meaningless, rather
+than special&mdash;the expression of a conventional
+vanity without warmth. There was an agreement
+that any one might look, the intensest
+gaze was invited, with the understanding that
+almost none should desire; and a cloak of hypocrisy
+had been the result; either that or the
+beauty was mechanical, the gesture furtive
+and hard.<a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a></p>
+
+<p>For Havana a woman was, in principle, a
+flower with delicate petals easily scattered, a
+perfume not to be rudely, indiscriminately,
+spent; a rose, it was the implication, had its
+moment, its perfection of eager flushed loveliness,
+during which what man would not reach
+out his hand? After that ... but the seed
+pods were carefully, jealously, tended. And
+here, in addition to so much else, was another
+shared attitude drawing me toward Havana&mdash;an
+enormous preference for women who had
+the courage of their emotions over those completely
+circumspect except in situations morally
+and financially solid.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>My dressing for dinner I delayed luxuriously,
+smoking the last Dimitrino cigarette
+found in a pocket, and leaving the wet prints
+of my feet on the polished tiles of the floor.
+I was glad that I had brought a trunk, variously
+filled, in place of merely a bag, as I
+might have done; for it was evident that Havana
+required many changes of clothes. It<a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a>
+was a city which to enjoy demanded a meticulous
+attention to trifles. For one thing it
+was going to be hot, April was well advanced;
+and the glorietas, the brightly illuminated
+open cafés, the thronged Prado and operatic
+Malecón, the general air of tropical expensiveness,
+insisted on the ornamental fitness of
+its idlers.</p>
+
+<p>I debated comfortably the security of a dinner
+coat, slightly varied, perhaps, by white
+flannels; but in the end decided in favor of a
+more informal jacket of Chinese silk with the
+flannels. A shirt, the socks and scarf, were
+objects of separate importance; but when they
+were combined there was a prevailing shade
+of green.... I had no inclination to apologize
+for lingering over these details, but it
+might be necessary to warn the seekers after
+noble truisms that I had no part in their righteous
+purpose. Even noble truths, in their
+popular definitions, had never been a part of
+my concern: at the beginning I was hopelessly
+removed from them, and what was an instinct
+had become, in an experience of life not<a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a>
+without supporting evidence, the firmest possible
+attitude. A tone of candor, if my reflections
+were to have the slightest interest or
+value, was my first necessity; and candor compelled
+me to admit that I thought seriously
+about the jacket which finally slipped
+smoothly over my shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>It was an undeniable fact that I was newly
+in a land of enormous interest, which, just
+then, held the most significant and valuable
+crop growing on earth. But that didn't detain
+my imagination for a moment. The Havana
+that delighted me, into which I found
+myself so happily projected, was a city of
+promenading and posted theatre programmes,
+of dinners and drinks and fragrant cigars. I
+was aware that from such things I might, in
+the end, profit; but I'd get nothing, nothing in
+the world, from stereotyped sentiments and
+places and solemn gabbled information.</p>
+
+<p>On top of this I had a fixed belief in the actual
+importance of, say, a necktie&mdash;for myself
+of course; I was not referring to the neckties
+of the novelists with a mission, lost in the dilemma<a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a>
+of elevating mankind. A black string,
+or none at all, served their superiority. But
+for the light-minded the claim of a Bombay
+foulard against the solider shade of an Irish
+poplin was a delicate question; for the light-minded
+the choice of one word in preference
+to another&mdash;entirely beneath the plane of a
+mission&mdash;was a business for blood, an overt
+act. And with me there was a correspondence
+between the two, a personal exterior as
+nicely selected as possible and the mental attitude
+capable of exquisite choice in diction.
+But this was no more than a development of
+all that I first admitted, a repetition of my
+pleasure at being in Havana, a place where
+the election of a cocktail was invested with
+gravity. And, carefully finished except for
+the flower I'd get below, I was entirely in harmony
+with the envelopment, the adventure, to
+which my persistent good luck had brought
+me.</p>
+
+<p>The elevator going down was burdened
+with expensive women, their bodies delicately
+evident under clinging fragile materials, their<a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a>
+powdered throats hung with the clotted iridescence
+of pearls; the cage was filled with
+soft breathing and faint provocative perfumes&mdash;the
+special lure of flowers which nature had
+denied to them as women. It was, I told myself,
+all very reprehensible and delightful:</p>
+
+<p>Here were creatures, anatomically planned
+for the sole end of maternity, who had wilfully,
+wisely I felt, elevated the mere preliminary
+of their purpose to the position of its
+whole consummation. More intoxicated by
+sheer charm than by the bearing of children,
+resentful of the thickened ankles of their immemorial
+duty, they proclaimed by every enhanced
+and seductive curve that their intention
+was magnetic rather than economic.
+They were, however, women of my own land,
+secure in that convention which permitted
+them exposure with immunity, and here; in
+Havana, they failed to interest me; their
+voices, too, were sharp, irritable; and even in
+the contracted space of the elevator their
+elaborate backs were so brutally turned on the
+men with them&mdash;men correct enough except<a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a>
+for their studs&mdash;the hard feminine tyranny
+of the chivalrous United States was so starkly
+upheld, that I escaped with a sigh of relief
+into a totally different atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>The lower hall, the patio and dining-room
+on the left, were brilliant with life, the wing-like
+flutter of fans; and it would be necessary,
+I saw, to have my cocktail in the patio; but
+before that, following a purely instinctive
+course, I walked out to the paseo in front of
+the hotel. The white buildings beyond the
+dark foliage of the Parque were coruscant
+with electric signs, and, their utilitarian purpose
+masked in an unfamiliar language, they
+shared with the alabaster of the façades, the
+high fronds of the royal palms and the monument
+to Marti, in the tropical, the classic, romanticism.</p>
+
+<p>Hardly had I appeared, gazing down the
+illuminated arcade, when a man approached
+me with a flat wide basket of flowers. There
+were, inevitably, roses, tea roses as pale as the
+yellow of champagne, gardenias, so smooth
+and white that they seemed unreal, heavy with<a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a>
+odor; those I had expected, but what surprised
+me were some sprigs of orange blossom with
+an indefinite sweetness that was yet perceptible
+above the thicker scents. I chose the
+latter immediately, and the flower vendor,
+wholly comprehensive of my mood, placed the
+boutonnière in my jacket. The moment, now,
+had arrived for a Daiquiri: seated near the
+cool drip of the fountain, where a slight stir
+of air seemed to ruffle the fringed mantone of
+a bronze dancing Andalusian girl, I lingered
+over the frigid mixture of Ron Bacardi, sugar,
+and a fresh vivid green lime.</p>
+
+<p>It was a delicate compound, not so good as
+I was to discover later at the Telegrafo, but
+still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful
+to be sitting, at that hour in the Inglaterra,
+with such a drink. It elevated my contentment
+to an even higher pitch; and, with a detached
+amusement, I recalled the fact that farther
+north prohibition was formally in effect.
+Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was
+a dangerous agent, for it held, in its shallow
+glass bowl slightly encrusted with undissolved<a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a>
+sugar, the power of a contemptuous indifference
+to fate; it set the mind free of responsibility;
+obliterating both memory and to-morrow,
+it gave the heart an adventitious feeling
+of superiority and momentarily vanquished
+all the celebrated, the eternal, fears.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, that was the danger of skilfully prepared
+intoxicating drinks.... The word intoxicating
+adequately expressed their power,
+their menace to orderly monotonous resignation.
+A word, I thought further, debased by
+moralists from its primary ecstatic content.
+Intoxication with Ron Bacardi, with May,
+with passion, was a state threatening to privilege,
+abhorrent to authority. And, since the
+dull were so fatally in the majority, they had
+succeeded in attaching a heavy penalty to
+whatever lay outside their lymphatic understanding.
+They had, as well, made the term
+gay an accusation before their Lord, confounding
+it with loose, so that now a gay
+girl&mdash;certainly the only girl worth a ribbon or
+the last devotion&mdash;was one bearing upon her
+graceful figure, for she was apt to be reprehensibly<a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a>
+graceful, the censure of a society
+open to any charge other than that of gaiety in
+either of its meanings. A ridiculous, a tragic,
+conclusion, I told myself indifferently: but
+then, with a fresh Daiquiri and a sprig of
+orange blossoms in my buttonhole, it meant
+less than nothing. It grew cooler, and an
+augmented stir set in motion toward the dining-room,
+where the files of damask-spread
+tables held polished silver water-bottles and
+sugar in crystal jars with spouts.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>The wisdom of the attention I had given
+to my appearance was at once evident in the
+table to which the head waiter conducted me.
+Small and reserved with a canted chair, it was
+directly at one of the long windows on the
+Parque Central. This, at first sight, on the
+part of its arbiter, would not have been merely
+an affair for money&mdash;he had his eye on the effect
+of the dining-room as a whole, as an expanse
+of the utmost decorative correctness, and
+there were a number of men with quite<a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a>
+pretty women, a great asset publicly, who
+had been given places in the center of the
+room. Yes, where I was seated the ruffled
+curtains were swayed by the night breeze almost
+against my chair, a brilliant section of
+the plaza was directly at my shoulder, and I
+was pervaded by the essential feeling of having
+the best possible situation.</p>
+
+<p>This was not, perhaps, true of characters
+more admirable than mine: but if I had been
+seated behind one of the pillars, buried in an
+obscure angle, my spirits would have suffered
+a sharp decline. I should have thought, temporarily,
+less of Havana, of myself, and of the
+world. The passionate interest in living, the
+sense of æsthetic security, that resulted in my
+turning continually to the inconceivable slavery
+of writing, would have been absent. But
+seated in one of the most desirable spots in existence,
+a dining-room of copper glazed tiles
+open on the tropics, about to begin a dinner
+with shrimps in the pink&mdash;the veritable rose&mdash;of
+perfection, while a head waiter, a triumph
+of intelligent sympathy, conferred with<a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a>
+me on the delicate subject of wines, I felt
+equal to prose of matchless loveliness.</p>
+
+<p>The dinner, finally, as good dinners were
+apt to be, was small, simple, with&mdash;the result
+of a prolonged consideration&mdash;a bottle of
+Marquis de Riscal. All the while the kaleidoscope
+of the Parque was revolving in patterns
+of bright yellows, silver, and indigo. Passersby
+were remarkably graphic and near: a
+short man with a severe expression and a thick
+grey beard suddenly appeared in the open
+window and demanded that I buy a whole
+lottery ticket; a sallow individual from without
+unfolded a bright glazed sheaf of unspeakably
+stupid American magazines; farther off,
+the crowd eddied through the lanes between
+the innumerable chairs drawn up companionably
+on the plaza. At a table close by, a family
+of Cubans were supplementing the courses
+of formal dining with an endless vivacious
+chatter, a warmth of interest charming to
+follow.</p>
+
+<p>The father, stout, with an impressive moustache
+of which not one hair seemed uncounted<a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a>
+or mislaid, regarded his short fat wife, his tall
+slim son, and his two entrancing daughters
+with an impartially active and affectionate attention.
+The girls were young, one perhaps
+fifteen and the other not more than a year or
+so older, though they both managed lorgnons
+with an ease and impertinent frankness that
+an older woman might well have envied,
+while they talked in rushes of vivid Spanish
+with an emphases of delectable shrugged
+shoulders, and, recognizing an acquaintance,
+exhibited smiles as dazzling as only youth
+knew. The boy, however, engaged me more
+strongly; a tone darker than the others, in repose
+his face, delicate in feature, was grave,
+reflective; his smooth black hair grew into a
+peak on his brow, his gaze was considerate,
+direct, and his mouth sensitive. Cuba, I
+thought, at its best; and here that was very
+good indeed. Any such degree of mingled
+dignity and the highly impressionable, of reserve
+and flexibility, was absent from the
+cruder young of the north.</p>
+
+<p>He had, at the same time, an indefinable air<a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a>
+of melancholy, a bearing that, while not devoid
+of pride, belonged to a minor people,
+to an island the ultimate fate of which&mdash;in a
+political word of singular faithlessness&mdash;was
+hidden in shadow. An affair of mere simple
+courage, of execution for an ideal by Spanish
+rifles in a Cabañas foss, he would have borne
+with brilliant success; he'd have ornamented
+charmingly the security of a great coffee estate
+in Pinar del Rio; it was possible that he
+might be distinguished in finance; but there
+was not back of him the sense of sheer weight,
+of ponderous land, that gave, for example, the
+chance young Englishman his conscious security,
+the American his slightly shrill material
+confidence.</p>
+
+<p>This Cuban's particular quality, it seemed
+to me, belonged to the past, to an age when
+men wore jewelled buckles and aristocracy
+was an advantage rather than a misfortune.
+He had about him the graceful fatality now
+so bitterly attacked by the widening power of
+what was heroically referred to as the people.
+He represented, from the crown of his<a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a>
+lustrous hair to his narrow correct dancing
+shoes, in his shapely hands and dark fine skin,
+privilege and sequestered gold. Outrages, I
+had heard, soon to be forever overthrown! It
+was possible that both the charges and the
+threatened remedy were actualities, and that
+privilege would disappear ... from one
+hand to another, and great lawns be cut up
+into cabbage patches and Empire ball-rooms
+converted into communal halls for village
+rancor.</p>
+
+<p>Not much, in the way of benefit, could follow
+that. And women in starched linen collars,
+with starched theories of civic consciousness,
+would hardly be an improvement on
+fragrant memories of satin, moments of passion
+and frailty, and the beauty of tenderness.
+A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, represented
+a timeless striving for superiority,
+for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the
+littorals of slime; and their destruction in
+waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy
+was immeasurably disastrous. All of this I
+saw reflected in the boy with peaked hair at<a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a>
+the next table. He took a cigarette from a
+black silk case, and I was immediately reminded
+of my cigar.</p>
+
+<p>It had been chosen with immense care in the
+Inglaterra café for bonbons and souvenirs,
+liqueurs and cigars. How remarkable it was,
+I had thought, hovering above the case, which
+contained a bewildering choice of shapes and
+colors, to be in a land where all the cigars
+were, in the sense I knew, imported. I hesitated
+for a minute or more between a Larrañaga
+and a banquet Corona, and finally decided
+on the former. It was as long as the
+cigar called Fancy Tales, but slightly thicker
+and rolled to a point at either end; and the
+first breath of its smoke, drifting in a blue
+cloud away from the window, told me that
+until then I had known but little of tobacco.
+Coffee so black that it stained the white shell
+of its cup; a diminutive glass of Grand Marnier,
+the distilled last saturation of oranges
+and fin champagne; and the Larrañaga, the
+color of oak leaves freshly brown, combined in
+a transcending magic of contentment.<a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a></p>
+
+<p>The point was&mdash;my special inhibition as a
+traveler&mdash;that I didn't want to move; I had
+no wish to speak to anyone or see what, particularly,
+I should have hurried away to view.
+That impatience I had served when I was
+twenty-one, in Naples; a city uniquely planned
+for morbid and natural curiosity. There the
+animated frescoes of Pompeii had been posed,
+at two lire a figure, before my assumption of
+mature experience. But now, past forty, I
+was without the ambition and desire to follow
+the cabs of the American business men who,
+in the company of patient and fatigued Cubans,
+were, in the interest of vague appointments,
+bidding their families elaborate good
+evenings.</p>
+
+<p>Later it was inevitable that I should get to
+the theatres, hear whatever music offered, and
+see all the dancing, Spanish and Cuban, in the
+city of Havana, but not to-night. My present
+pleasure was not to be wasted in the bother of
+movement and a probable mistake. The cigar
+continued to veil me in its reflective smoke
+for another half hour, there was more coffee<a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a>
+in the pot. The tempered heat of the day lay
+over me like a spell, like an armor against
+the chill, the gaunt winds and rain, of the
+north. The scent of the sprig of orange blossoms
+was just perceptible, at once faint and
+laden with the potency of a magical grove.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>The weather, the temperature and special
+atmospheric envelopment of Havana, was, I
+was certain, different from any other, its heat
+modified by the winds that moved across the
+island at night, at least from this shore, and
+the days flooded with an incandescent sunlight
+like burning magnesium. Stirring slowly
+about my room before breakfast, the slatted
+shutters bowed against the already blazing
+day, a thread of cigarette smoke climbing
+hopelessly toward the far ceiling, I thought
+of the idiotic popular conviction that the
+weather was a topic for stupid minds. The
+reverse, certainly, was true, since, inbound
+with all the settings of life, all nature, the<a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a>
+weather offered an illimitable range of suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>It had been the great discovery of imaginative
+prose&mdash;the novel for which we care most
+had been largely the result of that gained appreciation;
+and its absence in older books,
+placed in a vacuum, entirely accounted for
+their dry unreality. What, for instance, were
+the novels of Thomas Hardy but splendid records
+of the countryside weather, for nature
+and weather were one. This, more than any
+other force, conditioned men, stamping them
+out with an ice age, burning them black in
+Africa ... setting royal palms by the doors
+of the Hotel Inglaterra and willows along my
+lower lawn.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between Havana and West
+Chester was exactly that difference in their
+foliage, in the low April green of one and the
+harsh high fronds of the other. The quality,
+the weather, that made the trees made
+equally the men, just as it dictated their lives,
+the houses they lived in, their industries and<a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a>
+planted grains. This was true not only of the
+country but of the city, too, of George Moore
+as well as Hardy; for though Moore belonged
+principally to salons and the discreet interiors
+of broughams, a good half of the beauty of his
+pages was due to his response to the quality
+of spring against a smoke-blackened London
+wall, the laburnum blossoming in his Dublin
+garden.</p>
+
+<p>The slightest impression of Havana must
+be founded on a sensitive recognition of the
+crystal light and printed shadows which, in
+addition to its architecture of fact, brought another
+of sweeping illusion. In the morning
+the plazas glittered in a complete revelation
+of every hard carving and leaf and painted
+kiosk, but later the detail merged in airy diagonal
+structures of shade. Modified, infrequently,
+by the gorgeous cumulous clouds
+drifting from the upward thrust, the anchorage,
+of the Andes, the entire process of the
+hours was upset. This was not simply a variation
+of inanimate surface, it had an exact
+counterpart in the emotions: bowed by an insuperable<a name="page_043" id="page_043"></a>
+blaze or upright in the veiled sun,
+the attitude of harmony was profoundly affected.
+The night was altogether separate,
+a time, I gathered, when it seldom rained; and
+there was never another city that took advantage
+of the night like Havana. Released from
+the resplendent tyranny of the sun, everyone,
+it appeared, disdaining sleep, lingered in the
+plazas, the cafés, and along the sea-walls, until
+dawn threatened. Here the dark was not
+alone a stage for nocturnal plans and figures:
+it was without strangeness or fear for the Cubans
+thronging abroad, on foot and in motors,
+early and late. The whiteness of the buildings,
+too, even where they were not illuminated,
+defined spaces never obscure; the city
+was never wholly lost, obliterated by the imponderable
+blackness of the north. All this,
+every aspect of Havana's being, was the gift&mdash;the
+dangerous gift&mdash;of its situation, its
+weather. The blinding day, the city folded
+in a sparkling night, like a vision in blanched
+satin with fireflies in her hair, were nothing
+more than meteorological.<a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a></p>
+
+<p>For myself, my entire attitude was different
+in the room I now inhabited from the inherent
+feeling, in New York, of the Algonquin.
+I was, in white flannels and brown
+Holland, with roses against the mirror of the
+bureau, another man; not only my mentality
+but my physical bearing was changed. Here
+I was an individual who, moving about for
+an hour or so in the morning, spent the day
+until late afternoon in some quiet and cool
+inner spaciousness. That, I appreciated at
+once, was one of the comfortable peculiarities
+of Havana: it was always possible to be cool&mdash;in
+a café with the marble floor sprinkled with
+water; at the entrance of the Inglaterra,
+where, however, the chairs were the most uncomfortable
+in the world; or, better yet, with
+a book, a naranjada, and pajamas, transiently
+at home.</p>
+
+<p>For the iced refrescos of Cuba I had been
+prepared; and at breakfast, though that, I
+found later, was not its hour, I chose, rather
+than a naranjada, a piña colado&mdash;a glass,
+nearly as large and quite as thin as possible, of<a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a>
+the chilled essence of pineapple. A remarkable,
+a delightful, concoction. Later I heard
+the refrescos referred to contemptuously by
+Americans whose attitude toward the Cubans
+paralleled their opinion of the local drinks.
+They elected whiskey, at times condescending
+to gin, and the effect was portentous. Some
+sat near me now, with breakfasts of bubbling
+ham and crisped eggs, lamenting the coffee.</p>
+
+<p>It was doubtless part of the hypnotism of
+my liking for Havana that reconciled me to
+the coffee, poured simultaneously with hot
+salted milk into the cup. I accepted it at once,
+together with a cut French roll ingeniously
+buttered. Other efforts were made, through a
+window, to sell a wallpaper of lottery tickets;
+the vendor of magazines now put forward the
+Havana Post, printed in English; the curtains
+hung motionless, a transparent film on the
+bright space beyond.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing I had to do, or see, no
+duty to myself to fulfill; and, watching the
+stir of tourist departure, I was thankful for
+<a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a>my total lack of uncomfortable incentive. I
+had, for instance, no intention of ascending the
+height of Morro Castle, which&mdash;I had hardly
+needed the assurance&mdash;included a fatiguing
+number of stairs; nor of becoming familiar
+with Cabañas fortress. It had been quite
+enough to see in passing that long pink wall
+and know that there were old batteries of
+cannon embossed with the sovereign names of
+Spain. There were no picture galleries; and
+in Havana the churches were rich in neither
+tradition nor beauty, and the convents of
+early days had been turned into warehouses.
+It was, on the whole, a city without obtrusive
+history; even its first site was on the other
+side of the island; the wall, except for a fragment
+or two, had gone; its early aspects were
+practically absorbed by the later spirit that
+had captivated me. Here, if ever, was a place
+in which honesty of mood could be completely
+indulged.</p>
+
+<p>A state not innocent of danger to the Puritan
+tradition&mdash;lately assaulted with useless
+vigor&mdash;of suppression; for to the Latin acceptance
+of the whole of life had been added<a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a>
+the passions of the tropics. Cuba had cynically
+realized this, and multiplied a natural
+frankness with a specialized attention to the
+northern masculinity I had seen leaving the
+hotel at odd hours last night. I felt even so
+soon, with prohibition a reality, that our national
+prudery was a very unfortunate influence
+indeed in Havana. The season was at an
+end&mdash;only a few days of the racing remained&mdash;so
+I had missed the obvious worst; but traces
+of the corruption of the dull, the dull themselves
+in diminishing numbers, lingered.</p>
+
+<p>Havana, in common with other foreign
+countries, and with so many golden reasons to
+the contrary, had no general liking for Americans.
+The few who had understood Cuba,
+either living there or journeying with discretion,
+were most warmly appreciated; and,
+characteristically, it was they more than the
+natives who were principally disconcerted by
+the released waggishness of Maine and Ohio
+and Illinois. But the majority were merely
+exploited. There was, certainly, something
+on the other side of the fence, for the Cubans<a name="page_048" id="page_048"></a>
+were morbidly sensitive about their land, their
+monuments and martyrs, not necessarily impressive
+to the Anglo-Saxon heritage and
+temperament. There were fundamental racial
+differences, with a preponderant ultimate
+weight in favor of continents as opposed to
+islands. The fascination Havana had for me
+wasn't inevitable; I was only considering with
+regret, æsthetic rather than moral, the effect
+on Cuba of any prostitution.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>As, in a temporary stoppage of its circular
+traffic, I walked across the Parque Central, its
+limits seemed to extend indefinitely, as if it
+had become a Sahara of pavement exposed
+to the white core of the sun; and I passed with
+a feeling of immense relief into the shade of
+a book-shop at the head of Obispo Street,
+where the intolerable glare slowly faded from
+my vision as I fingered the heaps of volumes
+paper-bound in a variegated brightness of
+color and design. In any book-shop I was
+entirely at home, contented; and here specially<a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a>
+I was prepossessed with the idea of buying a
+great number of the novels solely for their
+covers&mdash;in short, making a collection of Spanish
+pictorial bindings. But the novels, I discovered,
+were, even in paper, almost a peso
+each; and since I was reluctant to invest two
+hundred or more dollars in a mere beginning,
+the idea vanished. Their imaginative quality,
+however, the drawing and color printing, were
+excellent, far better than ours; in fact, we
+owned nothing at all like them.</p>
+
+<p>They had a freedom of cruelty, a brutality
+of statement, of truth, absent in American sentimentality:
+where women were without clothes
+they were naked, anatomically accounted
+for, as were the men; and the symbolical
+representations of labor and injustice were instinct
+with blood and anguish. A surprising
+number of stories by Blasco Ibáñez were evident;
+and it struck me that if I had read him
+in those casual bright copies, without the ponderous
+weight of his American volumes and
+uncritical reputation, I might have found a
+degree of enjoyment. There were a great<a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a>
+many magazines, mostly Spanish, gayly
+covered but with the stupidest contents imaginable&mdash;the
+bad reproductions of contemporary
+photographs on vile grey paper; although
+one, La Esefa, admirably reproduced,
+in vivid color and titles, the Iberian spirit of
+the lighter Goya.</p>
+
+<p>Though I had been on narrow streets before,
+I had never seen one with the dramatic quality
+of Obispo. Hands might almost have touched
+across its paved way, and the sidewalks, no
+more than amplified curbs, hardly allowed for
+the width of a skirt. It was cooled by shadow,
+except for a narrow brilliant strip, and the
+open shops were like caverns. The windows
+were particularly notable, for they held the
+wealth, the choice, of what was offered within:
+diamonds and Panama hats, tortoise shell,
+Canary Island embroidery, and perfumery.
+There were cafés that specialized in minute
+cakes of chocolate and citron and almond paste
+set out in rows of surprisingly delicate workmanship,
+and shallow cafés whose shelves
+were banked with cordials and rons, gin,<a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a>
+whiskies, and wine. There were bottles of
+eccentric shape holding divinely colored liqueurs,
+squat bottles and pinched, files of amber
+sauternes, miniature glass bears from Russia
+filled with Kümmel, yellow and green
+chartreuse, syrupy green and white menthes,
+the Cinziano vermouth of Italy, Spanish cider,
+and orderly companies of mineral waters.</p>
+
+<p>These stores had little zinc-topped bars, and
+there were always groups of men sipping and
+conversing in their rapid intent manner. The
+street was crowded and, invariably allowing
+the women the wall, it was necessary to step
+again and again from the sidewalk. They
+were mostly Americans: the Cuban women
+abroad were in glittering automobiles, already
+elaborate in lace and jewels and dipping
+hats, and drenched in powder. They were,
+occasionally, when young, extremely beautiful,
+with a dark haughtiness that I had always
+found irresistible.</p>
+
+<p>In my early impressionable years it had
+continually been my fate to be entranced by
+lovely disagreeable girls with cloudy black<a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a>
+hair and skin stained with brown rather than
+pink. Imperious girls with elevated chins
+and straight sensitive noses! They had never,
+by any chance, paid the slightest attention to
+me; and the Cubans passing by with an air of
+supreme disdain called back my old interest
+and my old desire. I felt, for the moment,
+very young again and capable of romantic
+folly, of following a particular beauty to
+where her motor&mdash;a De Dion landaulet&mdash;disappeared
+into a courtyard with the closing
+of the great iron-bound doors.</p>
+
+<p>A marked, not to say sensational, transformation
+of my own person had been a conspicuous
+part of that young imaginary business; for,
+though I was fat and clumsy, I managed to see
+myself tall and engaging, and dark, too; or,
+anyhow, a figure to beguile a charming girl.
+Something of that hopeless process had taken
+place in me once more, now the vainer for the
+fact that even my youth had gone. The
+quality which called back a past illusion was
+very positive in Havana, and my feeling for
+the city was greatly enriched, further defined.<a name="page_053" id="page_053"></a>
+It was charged with hazard for what men like
+me had dreamed, leaving the actuality for the
+pretended; the pretended, that so easily became
+the false, was, in Havana, real.</p>
+
+<p>The Obispo under its striped awnings, with
+its merchandise of coral and high combs
+and pineapple cloths; the women magnetic
+with a Spain that had slept with the East, the
+South; the bright blank walls, lemon yellow,
+blue, rose; the palms borne against the sky on
+trunks like dulled pewter; the palpable sense
+of withdrawn dark mystery, all created an
+atmosphere of a too potent seductiveness.
+The street ended in the Plaza de Armas, with
+the ultramarine sea beyond; and as I sat, facing
+the arched low buff façade of the President's
+Palace, my brain was filled with vivid
+fragments of emotion.</p>
+
+<p>What suddenly I realized about Havana,
+the particular triumph of its miraculous vitality,
+was that it had never, like so much of
+Italy, degenerated into a museum of the past,
+it was not in any aspect mortuary. Its relics
+of the conquistadores were swept over by the<a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a>
+flood of to-day. Yet I began to be vaguely
+conscious of the history of Cuba, of that Cuba
+from which Cortez had set sail, in the winter
+of fifteen hundred and nineteen, for Mexico.
+Later this would, perhaps, become clearer to
+me; not pedantically, but because the spirit
+of that early time was still alive. I made no
+effort to direct my mind into deep channels.
+What must come must come; and if it were a
+gin rickey rather than the slavery of the repartimento
+system, I'd be little enough disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>The gin rickey proved to be an immediate
+reality, in the patio of the Inglaterra&mdash;a
+stream of silver bubbles shot into a glass where
+an emerald lime floated vivaciously. I had
+no intention of going out again until the
+shadows of the late afternoon had lengthened
+far toward the white front of the Gomez-Mena
+building across the plaza; and after
+lunch I went up to the quiet of my room. I
+should, certainly, write no letters, read&mdash;idly&mdash;none
+of the few books published about
+Cuba, which were on my table; and I began<a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a>
+the essays of James Huneker called Bedouins.
+His rhapsodies over Mary Garden,
+as colorful in style as the glass above the window,
+I soon dropped and picked indifferently
+among the novels that remained. A poor lot&mdash;the
+thin current stream of American fiction,
+doubly pale in Havana.</p>
+
+<p>The day wheeled from south to west. I was
+perfectly contented to linger doing nothing,
+scarcely thinking, in the subdued and darkened
+heat. There was a heavy passage of
+trunks through the echoing hall without, the
+melancholy calling of the evening papers rose
+on the air; I was enveloped in the isolation of
+a strange tongue. To sit as still as possible,
+as receptive as possible, to stroll aimlessly,
+watch indiscriminately, was the secret of conduct
+in my situation. Nothing could be
+planned or provided for. The thing was to
+get enjoyment from what I did and saw; what
+benefit I should receive, I knew from long experience,
+would be largely subconscious. I
+had been in Havana scarcely more than a day,
+and already I had collected a hundred impressions<a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a>
+and measureless pleasure. How wise I
+had been to come ... extravagantly, with&mdash;as
+it were&mdash;a flower in my coat, a gesture of
+protest, of indifference, to all that the world
+now emphasized.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>However, the tranquillity of the afternoon
+was sharply interrupted by my going, unexpectedly,
+to the races at Oriental Park. I had
+to dress with the utmost rapidity, leaving the
+choice of a tie to chance, for the dun car of the
+United States Military Attaché was waiting
+for me. The Attaché, handsomely bearing
+the brown seal of Philippine campaigns, abstracted
+in manner, sat forward with an imperturbable
+military chauffeur, while the back of
+the car was flooded by the affable speech of a
+Castilian marquis whose variety of experience
+in the realms of expert and dangerous games
+had been limited only by their known forms.
+It was unquestionably the mixture of my commonplace
+Presbyterian blood and incurable
+habit of romance that gave me a distinct satisfaction
+in my surroundings. I was glad that<a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a>
+the Marquis was what he was and that he held
+a trans-continental motor record; it pleased
+my honest democratic instincts when other
+cars were held back for our progress; and,
+finally, the deep chairs on the veranda of the
+Jockey Club were precisely right for a lounging
+afternoon in an expensive sporting atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>The race track seemed to me long&mdash;was it
+a mile?&mdash;and, with the horses at a starting post
+across from the grandstand, I couldn't tell
+one from another. The grandstand was on
+the right, and beyond the park were low monotonous
+lines of stables. It had been raining,
+the track was heavy, and the race that followed
+the blowing of a bugle covered the silk
+of the jockeys with mud. My pleasure, as
+always, slowly subsided at the persistent intrusion
+of an inner destructive questioning. Incontestably
+the racing, the horses lining fretfully
+and scrambling through the muddy
+pools, left me cold. The sweep of the Jockey
+Club, too, was comparatively empty of interest;
+the spectators there, though they were<a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a>
+more or less intent upon the results posted on
+the board opposite, were not the immemorial
+onlookers at such affairs of sweepstakes, selling
+plates and furloughs.</p>
+
+<p>The Cuban women present, elaborately
+dressed for shaded lawns and salons de thé,
+were largely foreign to the wide-spread open
+spectacle. I remembered English races
+where groups of dukes with ruddy features, in
+rough tweeds, sat through drizzling afternoons
+on their iron-shod seat ricks, and women
+of title, in waterproofs and harsh brogues,
+tramped through the sloshing turf ... an attitude
+far removed from Havana. A group
+of royal palms, lifted in the middle distance,
+alone gave the races an exotic air; though
+they were, of course, promoted and ridden by
+Americans, and their mechanics were quite
+those which operated in New Orleans and
+Butte and Baltimore. Now I was annoyed
+because I had, thoughtlessly, come; I might as
+well have gone to the baseball game in what
+had formerly been the bull ring.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I could retire to my speculations for<a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a>
+escape, and I thought how peculiarly modern
+outdoor games, sport, belong to the British&mdash;to
+them and their relatives beyond the sea. I
+remembered, in this connection, the story of
+a French vicomte I knew, a man of imposing
+build, who, in yellow gloves, shot field larks
+attracted by the flashing of a mirror manipulated
+by his valet. Le sport! But the Spaniards,
+bred to the delicate agility of bull fighting,
+trained in endurance on the inconceivably
+fast pelota courts, were more athletic
+than the French; though, as a race, they were
+inclined to delegate their games to professionals.
+The sporting amateur, in spite of
+the Marquis, was a rarity; rather they chose
+to be lookers-on at brilliant diversions which
+retained an appreciable amount of a mediæval
+cruelty diversified from our own brutal
+strain.</p>
+
+<p>This, naturally, had been influenced,
+strengthened, in Cuba by the climate, the
+breath of the tropics; even the winters were
+not conducive to violent exercise, aside from
+the fact that that was the prerogative of stolid<a name="page_060" id="page_060"></a>
+temperaments. It was the deliberate, the unexcitable,
+who most excelled at trials of personal
+muscular skill; and neither of them
+were at home below certain latitudes. For
+myself, I was grateful, for I hadn't much in
+common with the exemplifications of field
+skill I had met. They were very apt to pay
+for their success by the absence of the attributes
+I particularly admired; often they were
+snobs of a very exasperating type&mdash;monuments
+of college beef with irreproachable hair, sacrosanct
+pins, and insensate conventional mentalities.</p>
+
+<p>A race at an end, the jockeys, carrying their
+saddles, trooped to the judges' stand to be
+weighed, and I was shocked by their wizened,
+preternaturally cunning faces. They were
+like pygmies of a strange breed in red and yellow
+and blue satins; faultless for their purpose,
+on the ground they were extraordinary,
+leather-skinned, with puckering eyes, drawn
+mouths, and distorted bodies. They wrangled
+among themselves in shrill or foggy voices&mdash;a
+very depressing specialization of humanity.<a name="page_061" id="page_061"></a>
+But the horses were magnificent, slender and
+shining. I admired them from a distance,
+glad that it was no part of my responsibility
+to ride. Long ago, under the pressure of an
+untender emotion, I had learned to sit on a
+horse through his reasonable moments; but I
+had never become at ease, and I stopped riding
+when, on the country road of a May Sunday
+noon, a tall sorrel ran away with me so
+fast and so far that we passed three churches
+with their scattering congregations.</p>
+
+<p>There were, on the veranda, drinks, and
+even they&mdash;the Scotch highballs&mdash;translated
+into Spanish, had an unfamiliar and borrowed
+sound. It was on my return, stopping at the
+Telegrafo Café, that I learned the delightful
+possibility of a Daiquiri cocktail. It was
+twice as large as ordinary, what in the north
+was called a double; but no Daiquiri out of
+Cuba could be thought of in comparison.
+Only one other drink might be considered&mdash;a
+Ramos gin-fizz. My extreme allegiance had
+been given to the latter. I was not willing,
+even in the Telegrafo, to depose it from first<a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a>
+place; but the Telegrafo was a pleasanter spot
+than the New Orleans Stag bar. I could see
+the beginning of the Prado, with the swirl
+of cars on their afternoon round to the Malecón.
+Some arc-lights, just turned on, were
+sources of color, like great symmetrical
+lemons, rather than of illumination. After
+another rain the bare flambeau trees would
+burst into fiery bloom.</p>
+
+<p>I was alone, and, sauntering back to the Inglaterra,
+through the gallery that had once
+been the Paseo Isabel, I came on my flower
+man, who advanced with a smile and a close
+nosegay of gardenias. A curious flower, I
+thought, getting water for them in a glass.
+They didn't wilt, as was usual, but turned
+brown and faded in the manner of a lovely
+pallid woman&mdash;a simile I had used in Linda
+Condon. A flower that belonged less to nature
+than to drawing-rooms, to rococo salons
+and the opera loges of eighteen forty, and not
+at all to the present in the United States. But
+worn low on the neck, it was entirely appropriate
+to the black hair of the Cuban woman.<a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a>
+Gold hair, the fair temperament, had no business
+with gardenias: bouquets of white sweet
+peas looped with pale green and silver ribbon,
+yes; and dark bunches of moss roses; the old
+bouquets of concentric rings of buds in lace
+paper! They were the property of the girls I
+had known, the frank girls with clear grey
+eyes and the appealing girls with eyes like
+forget-me-nots. Something more poignant, a
+heavier disturbing perfume, was necessary
+against a figure seen only from a balcony or
+with a vague fleetness behind a grille gracefully
+wrought out of iron.</p>
+
+<p>My shutters now were opened, and I could
+make out, against the dimming sky, the languid
+folds of the Spanish flag above the entrance
+of the Centro Gallego&mdash;the standard
+that had conquered the western tropics, only,
+in turn, to be subdued by a freedom of the
+wind mightier than His Most Catholic Majesty.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>There was some question of where I'd go
+for dinner, for in Havana there were many<a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a>
+cafés to explore&mdash;the Dos Hermanos, the
+Paris, the Florida, the Hotel de Luz, the Miramar;
+but, finally, I walked down to the
+Prado, to the sea and the Miramar, a little because
+of its situation, directly on the Malecón,
+but principally for the reason that it had one
+of the most beautiful names possible, a name
+which called up the image of a level tide so
+smooth that it held in shining replica the forts,
+the ships, and the clouds. Tables were prepared
+for dinner in the restaurant, while those
+on the terrace were without cloths; but there
+I determined to sit, and the waiter whose attention
+I captured, after a long delay, agreed.</p>
+
+<p>A solitary couple had their heads together
+by the window, and they, with myself, were
+the only diners. It was, evidently, not now
+the place to go to at this hour. Beyond the
+dining-room, a patio, or rather an open court,
+was set for dancing, melancholy as such spaces
+can be, deserted and half-lighted; but I saw
+that a considerable activity was expected much
+later.</p>
+
+<p>I was glad that the terrace was empty, for,<a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a>
+with the light now faded from the sea and
+its blueness merging into black, the remote
+tranquillity of evening was happier without a
+sharp chatter of voices. The Miramar, considering
+its place&mdash;the most advantageous in
+all Havana&mdash;and fame was surprisingly small:
+scarcely more than two stories high, the sombre
+maroon walls with their long windows hardly
+filled an angle of the Malecón. The dinner
+was slow in arriving, the silver made its appearance,
+a goblet was brought separately, a
+plate of French bread was later followed by
+its butter. The minute native oysters were no
+more than shreds adhering to their shells, but
+they had a notable flavor; a crawfish was at its
+brightest apogee; and an omelet browned in a
+delicate perfection of powdered sugar.</p>
+
+<p>I deserted Spanish wine, the admirable
+Riscal, for champagne; for there was about
+an air of departed charm, the whisper of old
+waltzes and tarleton, that demanded commemoration.
+The Miramar had been the gay
+center of that mid-century life which had
+folded Havana in the lasting influence of its<a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a>
+memories. A gaiety not even at a disadvantage
+compared to the feverish society of to-day!
+The bodices then had been no more
+than scraps of chambery gauze and Chinese
+ribbon below shoulders to the whiteness of
+which the entire feminine age had been devoted.
+The flounced bell skirts had swung
+airily on gracious silk clappers.</p>
+
+<p>The automobiles on the Malecón multiplied,
+for the night was hot; soon there was a
+solid double opposed procession on the broad
+sweeping drive. This was a triumph of
+American engineering and, I had no doubt,
+an improvement on the informality of rocks
+and débris that had existed before. Yet I
+should liked to have seen it when the promenade
+had not yet been laid down with mechanical
+precision, in, perhaps, the early seventies.
+Then there were sea baths cut in the live rock
+at the end of the Paseo Isabel, at the Campos
+Eliseos, where the water was like a cooler
+liquid green air, and where, after storms, a
+foaming surf poured over the barriers. There
+were no motors then, but volantes and the modern<a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a>
+quintrins, with two horses, one outside the
+shafts, and a riding calesero in vermilion and
+gold lace; and, latest of all, as new as possible,
+the victorias.</p>
+
+<p>Neither, then, was the Prado paved, but
+the trees were infinitely finer&mdash;five rows there
+were in fifty-seven&mdash;when the clamor of the
+city was, in great part, peals of bells. This
+was a familiar process with me, to leave the
+present for the past in a mood of irrational
+regret. But never for the heroic, the real
+past; the years I chose to imagine lay hardly
+behind the horizon; in Italy it had been the
+Risorgimento, at farthest the villeggiatura of
+Antonio Longo or the viole d'amore of Cimarosa
+in churches. And now, drinking my
+champagne on the empty flagged terrace of
+the Miramar, facing, across the parade of
+automobiles, the blank curtain of the night,
+starred on the right by the lights of castellated
+forts, my mind vibrated with grace notes no
+longer heard outside the faint distilled sweetness
+of music boxes.</p>
+
+<p>As if in derision of this, a loud unexpected<a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a>
+music rose from the bandstand in the Plaza,
+and I saw that a flood of people, seated or
+moving along the pavements and through the
+lanes of chairs, had gathered. Nothing, I
+thought, could have delighted me more; but
+my anticipation was soon smothered by the
+absurdity of the selections: they were not from
+Balfé nor Rossini, neither military nor the
+accented rhythm of Spain ... the opening
+number was Parsifal, blown into the profound
+night with a convention of brassy emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>At the total destruction of my pleasure I
+cursed the pretentious stupidity of the band-master
+and a great deal else of modern Cuba.
+I remembered particularly some regrets, locally
+expressed, that the Spanish domination
+was no more. Things, it was said, were better
+ordered then. But this was a position the
+vainness of which I couldn't join: it was no
+part of my disposition to combat, or even regret,
+the inevitable. My course&mdash;quite other&mdash;was
+to project myself into periods whose
+very loss formed most of their charm. Gone,
+they took on the tender memories of the dead,<a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a>
+and were invested with the dignity, the beauty,
+of a warm fragility.</p>
+
+<p>Two girls were now seated at a table by the
+entrance, and, though they were alone for the
+moment, it was evident that they had no intention
+of remaining in that unprofitable state
+longer than necessary. Their fleet appraising
+glances rested on me and the silver bucket
+by my chair, and one permitted the shadow
+of a discreet smile to appear on her carmined
+lips. She was pretty, lightly dressed in a
+flowery summer stuff, but she was as gold in
+coloring as corn silk; an intrusion in Havana
+I seriously deplored. The other was dark,
+but she was, at the same time, disagreeable;
+something had annoyed her excessively, and I
+made no move. Such company was occasionally
+entertaining, in a superficial conversational
+sense; but, I was obliged to add, not
+often.</p>
+
+<p>I went over all the informal girls I could
+recall who had been worth the effort to cultivate
+them, either charming or wise or sensitive,
+and my bag, unlike Chopin's or what George<a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a>
+Moore reported his, was discouragingly slim.
+They had been, but perhaps of necessity, materialists,
+valuers only of the expensively concrete;
+yes, the majority of such adventures had
+been sordid. It was due, without question,
+to certain deterrent qualities in my own personality;
+but even more, I was convinced, to
+the fact that, in America, girls, or at least
+those of my youth, regarded emotion as portentously
+synonymous with ruin. Emotion,
+for nice girls, was deprecated; their sense of
+modesty, of shame, was magnified at the expense
+of everything else. This, together with
+the tragic difference in the age of marriage
+in nature and in society, had condemned the
+United States to very low levels of feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately I had been born into the most
+rigid of all societies&mdash;a prosperous and Presbyterian
+middle-class; an influence that succeeded
+in making religion hideous before I
+was fifteen, planting in me, too, the belief that
+man was, in his instinctive life, filthy. I outgrew
+the latter, but never the first; and now,
+looking back, I could recognize how that<a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a>
+lauded creed had nearly damned me to a hell
+far surpassing in dreadfulness anything of its
+own bitter imagining. The cold metaphysical
+fog had saturated us all alike.... How
+dreary my early experience was ... what
+detestable travesties of passion! A carful of
+young men soon stopped at the curb of the
+Miramar, and the two girls, dark and gold,
+were immediately invested with the politest
+attentions. There was a chorus of laughter
+and protests and suggestions, in which a privileged
+waiter joined; and afterwards they
+vociferously left to dance at Carmelo.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>Walking generally in the direction of my
+room, I left the Prado for an especially dramatic,
+no, melodramatic, street, where the bare
+walls and iron bolted doors were made startling
+by the white glare of electric lights.
+Fixed to the walls, infrequently, were the
+wrought-iron brackets of the earlier lanterns,
+converted, it might be, for the period before
+the present, into gas jets. In that watery illumination<a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a>
+such streets must have seemed less
+amazing than now, and entirely natural with
+only the oil lanterns lifting a small surface of
+masonry or an isolated angle out of the night.
+Indeed, whole districts were dark, except for
+a rare lamp privately maintained as an obligation
+of grace. That darkness, like the
+streets, was mediæval; they belonged one to
+the other&mdash;ways through which it was congruous
+to carry a flare and a sword, practical
+measures both.</p>
+
+<p>These precautions had been long discarded,
+but the passages themselves were unchanged,
+not a stone had shifted; they were, particularly
+at night, the Middle Ages. And it was as
+though a sudden blaze had been created by
+unholy magic; a sparkling and infernal radiance,
+throwing into intolerable clearness the
+decent reticence of the time. The arc lights
+gave the streets an absolute air of unreality
+and tragic strangeness. Moving in them, I
+had the feeling of blundering awake into a
+dream, of being irretrievably lost in an illusion
+of potential horror. An open door with<a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a>
+its glimpse into an inner room only increased
+the oppression: it, too, was brilliant with electricity,
+a room of unrelieved icy pallor, except
+for a warmer blur under an Agony on the
+Cross, where a small company of men and
+women sat in a rigid blanched formality that
+might have been death.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite natural, a commonplace of
+Havana; but rather than a picture of familiar
+life, it resembled the memento mori of a
+grotto. My thoughts turned to the symbols
+and representations of the Catholic Church&mdash;a
+business of blood and torment and flame, of
+Sebastian torn with arrows and a canonized
+girl, whose name I forgot, carrying her eyeballs
+in a hand. Curiously enough, the spirit
+which had given birth to this suffering had
+been popularly lost, together with any conception
+of the ages in which it occurred; and all
+that remained was a pathological horror.
+Italy and Spain were saturated by it&mdash;Italy
+in the revolting wax spectacles of Easter, and
+Spain with the veritable crucifixions of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>It was, I supposed, to a certain extent unavoidable<a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a>
+in an establishment whose hold on
+the ponderable present depended on threats
+and promises laid in the future. But it
+seemed to me unfortunate, to say the least, that
+a church whose business was life should be so
+concerned with smoky death. Threats and
+promises! The early history of Cuba, I remembered,
+was inbound with the administrative
+and protective powers of the Church: in
+fifteen hundred and sixteen the native Cubeños
+were put in the charge of the Order of Jeronimites,
+localized in La Espanola&mdash;Santo
+Domingo. The double motive of the Spanish
+Christian kings in the western hemisphere had
+been conversion and gold, but which of these
+was uppermost it was impossible to determine.
+However, when the gold, the temporal interest,
+decreased in one locality, the spiritual
+concern of Seville shifted to the more productive
+regions.</p>
+
+<p>That was a period, a conquest, when a violent
+death was a greater blessing than living
+in a state of damnable heresy; and so, between
+the saving of their souls and the loss of<a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a>
+their bodies in the king's mines, the natives
+were thoroughly cared for. It must be said,
+though, that de las Casas, a priest whose spirit
+was above any intimidation or venality, denounced
+the outrages against the Cuban Indians
+to the shining heavens, the cerulean sea,
+the Audencia, and the Throne. But his humanitarianism
+was ineffectual against a system
+founded on the belief that a god had given
+the earth and its recalcitrant people for the
+profit and glory, the servants, of a single religious
+dogma.</p>
+
+<p>It was, possibly, a mental imperfection
+which gave impressions, emotions, such a great
+suggestibility. Returning toward the Inglaterra,
+I had no intention of losing myself in
+the mazes of applied theology; and I speedily
+dropped such a sombre topic from my
+thoughts. Turning back to the Prado, I found
+the walks filled with men, progressing slowly
+or seated on the flat marble benches along the
+sides. Whenever a woman did pass on foot,
+their interest and speculations were endless:
+heads turned in rows, sage remarks were exchanged,<a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a>
+and tentative simpaticas murmured.
+Her mother&mdash;if she had the slightest pretensions
+to youth or good looks&mdash;was fervently
+blessed for so fetching a daughter. Here, of
+course, was the defect of the local attitude toward
+women&mdash;it put the emphasis perpetually
+on a gallantry affecting the men more even
+than the women. There was a constant danger
+of becoming one-sided.</p>
+
+<p>The Telegrafo and the Louvre were
+crowded, with more refrescos and ices on the
+table than authoritative drinks; the cigarettes
+of the discursive throngs in the Parque Central
+were like a sheet of fire-flies, and the
+Marti and Pairet theatres were spreading
+abroad the audiences of their second evening
+shows. The patio of the Inglaterra was well
+filled, and I stopped there; not, however, for
+a naranjada. Some late suppers were still
+occupying the dining-room, and a drunken
+American was gravely addressing a table and
+meeting with a mechanical politeness that I
+admired for its sustained patience. He left,
+finally, and wandered unsteadily, a subject of<a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a>
+entertainment for his fellows and a mark of
+contempt to the Cubans present. Beyond me
+were some beautifully dressed English&mdash;two
+men in the final perfection of easy masculine
+garb and a girl, flushed with beauty, in pearls.
+On the other hand a young Frenchman, decorated
+with the most honorable of war ribbons,
+and two women, all in mourning, were
+conversing in the difficult Parisian idiom.</p>
+
+<p>I should have liked to be at either table&mdash;their
+attractions were equal; but, forced to remain
+alone, I thought of how rude the English
+would have been had I moved over to them.
+The English would have been boorish, and
+the French would have met me with an impenetrable
+polite reserve. Both would regard
+me as an idiot or an agent; to have spoken
+to them would have been an affront. And yet
+I was confident that we should have got on
+very well: I was not without a name in London,
+and the French were delightfully sensitive
+to any practising of the arts. The English,
+I gathered from their unguarded talk,
+were cruising on a yacht now lying in Havana<a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a>
+harbor; and I saw myself, the following morning,
+going off to them in a smart tender and
+sitting under the white awning spread aft,
+with a whisky and soda, talking or not, but
+happily aware of the shining brass and mahogany
+fittings, the immaculate paint and gay
+pennants.</p>
+
+<p>I had always liked worldly pomp and settings,
+marble Georgian houses with the long
+windows open directly on closed greens and
+statues of lead; and to linger, before going
+down to dinner, on a minstrel's gallery above a
+stone hall and gathered company. I'd rather
+be on a yacht than on an excursion boat; yet I
+infinitely preferred reading about the latter.
+For some hidden or half perceived reason,
+yachts were not impressive in creative prose;
+there the concerns and pleasures of aristocracy
+frequently appeared tawdry and unimportant.
+Even its heroism, in the valor of battle and
+imperturbable sacrifice, was less moving to
+me than simpler affairs. Yet there was no
+doubt but that I was personally inclined to the
+extremes of luxury; and this apparent contradiction<a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a>
+brought to my life, my writing, the
+problem of a devotion to words as disarmingly
+simple as the leaves of spring&mdash;as simple and
+as lovely in clear color&mdash;about the common experience
+of life and death, together with an
+absorbing attention for Manchu women and
+exotic children and emeralds.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>The following day, hot and still, with the
+exception of capricious movements of air in
+paved shaded places, was overcast, the brilliancy
+of Havana, of the white and green plazas,
+subdued. And this softening of sharp
+lines and blazing façades seemed to influence,
+too, the noises, the calls, of the streets, so that
+it was all apparently insubstantial, like the
+ultimate romantic mirage of a city. I wandered
+along Neptuno Street to Belascoin, and
+then to the Parque Maceo, where I ignored the
+massed bronze and granite of its statue for the
+slightly undulating shimmering tide. In the
+distance the sea was lost in the sky&mdash;a nebulous
+gray expanse such as might have existed<a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a>
+before the beginning of comparative solidity.
+I lost all sense of time, the centuries
+were jumbled together like mangos in a basket.
+Yes, they were no greater, no more important
+or stable, than tropical fruit.</p>
+
+<p>The vivid spectacle of Cuba, for example,
+contracted to a palm's breadth, the island became
+nothing more than the glimmer of a
+torch in illimitable dusk. It had been discovered
+by Columbus, a presumptuous term used
+arrogantly in the sense of created; an Arcadian
+shore where, because food grew without
+cultivation, without effort, and the gold was
+soft for beating into bracelets, the natives lived
+easily and ornamentally and in peace. They
+wore, rather than steel and the harsh shirts
+of the Inquisition, the feathers of birds with
+woven dyed quills and fragrant grasses.
+They sang, they danced with a notable grace,
+loved and died in the simplicity of bohios of
+palm board and thatch under nine Caciques.</p>
+
+<p>Then, in the drawing of a breath, they were
+all destroyed, gone, killed by slavery, in the
+name of God on the points of swords, by the<a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a>
+rapacity, the corruption, the diseases, of civilization.
+A Spanish Cuba rose&mdash;Iberian and
+yet singularly different&mdash;a business of Captain-General
+and Teniente Rey, of alcalde and
+alcaide, of Santiago de Cuba and San Cristóbal
+de la Habana. The French under Jacques
+Sores, and the English under Drake, sailed
+over the horizon. In less than a second, the
+expiration of a sigh, Diego de Velasquez and
+Narvaez, Isabel de Bobadilla, Rojas and Guzman,
+the merchant Diego Perez in vain laying
+the guns of the Magdalena in defense of
+the past, had gone. The Cedula from Madrid,
+in eighteen hundred and twenty-five, began
+the conspiracies, Tacón came and went,
+the fiscals beat free colored men to death and
+entertained the negro women naked at balls.
+The Lopez rebellion was followed by the ten
+years' war of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight
+and the peace of Zanjon, the great rebellion
+and Weyler.</p>
+
+<p>There remained now the indefinite sea and
+a city withdrawn, secretive, made vaguely
+beautiful by intangible voices, all its voices<a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a>
+that had laughed and shouted, whispered and
+cried; and by the towers and walls merged in
+a single pattern, the old and the new drawn
+together by an aspect of impermanence, freed
+from the deceptive appearance of solidity.
+Suddenly its history had been shown to me in
+a flash of emotion, a mood of feeling. I
+hadn't come to Cuba ignorant of the land, but
+I had determined to slight what was but written
+inanimate fact. I had no disposition for
+instruction: books were powerless to create La
+Punta for me, it must bear its own credentials
+... it might become, to my uncertain advantage,
+as important as a Daiquiri cocktail,
+as a Larrañaga cigar, but hardly more.</p>
+
+<p>In any other case I should have cheated myself,
+not only of pleasure, the relaxation possible
+to honesty of mind, but of any hope of future
+material. The creative habit was the
+most tireless and frugal in existence: there was
+nothing&mdash;no experience, person, disillusionment,
+or pain&mdash;not endlessly sounded for its
+every note and meaning. No one could predict<a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a>
+what would be indispensable, just as it
+was impossible to foresee, in the projection of
+a novel, where its fine moments occurred.
+And, returning to the descriptive and historical
+books on Cuba, left so largely unread at
+the Inglaterra, it was probable that they had
+omitted, in their effort for literal and conventional
+emphasis, what might in their subject be
+vivifying to me.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, was beyond spoiling&mdash;a history
+so picturesque, as I have intimated, that
+its very vividness, its commonest phases, had
+become the threadbare material of obvious
+romance. But, outside of all that, the other
+Havana, the mid-Victorian Pompeii, a city
+that none could have predicted or told me of,
+offered the incentive of its particular and rare
+charm. In the Parque Maceo, on the sea
+wall, my imagination stirred with the first
+beginnings of a story: it would take place in
+the period when the avaricious grip of Spain
+was loosening, a story of secret patriotism and
+the idealism of youth, set in marble salons, at<a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a>
+the opera and the cafés. It would not concern
+itself with any love except the fidelity between
+two men, a story of friendship.</p>
+
+<p>There it would be different from The Arrow
+of Gold and Doña Rita; no peignoirs,
+thank you, but a formality, a passionate propriety,
+in keeping with the social gravity and
+impersonal devotion of the very young.
+There must be crinoline&mdash;would I never escape
+from that!&mdash;and candelabra with glittering
+prisms; Spanish soldiers in striped linen
+and officials with green-tasselled canes. My
+youth, he'd come from the United States,
+would have his little dinners at the Restaurant
+Française, in Cuba Street number seventy-two,
+and his refrescos at the Café Dominica. In
+the end he'd leave Havana, having accomplished
+nothing but the loss of his illusions for
+the gain of a memory like a dream, but his
+friend, a Cuban&mdash;I had seen him that first
+night at dinner in the Inglaterra&mdash;would be
+killed. How....</p>
+
+<p>It was time to go back to the hotel, and the
+<a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a>story receded. I walked too far on Belascoin
+Street, all the way to Salud; and, past the Tacón
+Market, came out on the Parque de Colon,
+where now there was a hot dusty wind, like a
+localized sirocco, and I was glad to reach my
+room. The reflection of the colored glass
+above the window was hardly discernible on
+the tiles; the interior was permeated by a
+shadow which made the ceiling appear high
+beyond computation; and my wardrobe trunk,
+standing open, exhibited a rack of limp neckties.
+I turned again to the novels on the table
+and again let them drop, unattended, from a
+listless hand. Tepid water! And I wondered&mdash;a
+constant subject with me&mdash;when
+we should have a new vigorous American literature,
+a literature absolutely native, by men
+who had not, like myself, been to school to
+Turgenev and the English lyrical poetry.
+Henry James had found the United States
+lacking in background; the lack was evident,
+but not in the country of his birth.</p>
+
+<p>This was not a complaint against The Velvet
+Glove except as it equally applied to me;
+but an intense desire for a fresh talent, an<a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a>
+ability to which we could, without reserve,
+take off our hats. The fact hit me that I was
+forty, although it was still the fashion among
+reviewers to speak of me as a promising young
+man, and that there were patches of grey hair
+on my temples. Yet I had been, everything
+considered, remarkably successful; there was
+no need for sentimental regret, a trait of mental
+feebleness.</p>
+
+<p>I decided to do something positive that
+evening, to go to the theatre, or, if it were
+playing, to see the Jai Alai. The latter was
+possible, and, by way of the Telegrafo, I
+reached the Hotel Florida for dinner; a restaurant
+which, because of the windows looking
+down on it, had the pleasant individual
+air of a courtyard. The music played, diners
+came and went, and I gazed up at the shallow
+balconies in the hopefulness of an incorrigible
+imagination. The Fronton Jai Alai&mdash;in Havana
+the game, pelota, had taken the title of
+its court&mdash;was a long way from Obispo Street,
+but I knew when we had reached it by the
+solid volume of shouting that escaped from<a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a>
+the high concrete building into the dim neighborhood.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>Inside, the court was an immense expanse
+with granite-laid walls, a long rectangle, one
+side of which was formed by the steeply
+banked rows of spectators. Regular spaces
+were marked by white lines on the playing
+floor, and at one end the score was hung
+against the names of the players, now two
+teams&mdash;the Azules and the Blancos. The
+boxes were above the cement ledges packed
+with standing men, by a promenade, where the
+betting was conducted, cigars sold, and a small
+active bar maintained. It was the night of
+a gala benefit, for the Damas de Caridad, and
+I had been fortunate in getting a single box
+seat. I was late, though, and the game progressing;
+still, I was the first in our railed
+space; but the others, who proved to be Americans,
+soon followed&mdash;three prosperous men,
+manufacturers I thought, with wives in whom
+native good taste had been given the opportunities
+of large resources.<a name="page_088" id="page_088"></a></p>
+
+<p>One of the women&mdash;who, in the arrangement
+of the box, sat beside me&mdash;smiled with a magnetism
+that had easily survived the loss of her
+youth; she was rather silent than not, but the
+rest swept into a conversation in their best
+public manner. A man accompanying them,
+it developed, knew Cuba and Jai Alai, and he
+secured for the amusement of the others a
+cesta, the basket-like racquet worn strapped to
+the arm. It was from him I discovered that
+the court was two hundred and ten feet long
+and thirty-six feet wide; while the service consisted
+in dropping the ball and, on its rebound,
+catching it in the cesta and throwing it against
+the far end wall. From there, with a sharp
+smack audible all over the Fronton, the ball
+shot back, if not a fault, within a marked area,
+and one of the opposing side caught it, in the
+air or on the first bounce, and returned it
+against the end wall. At first I could see
+nothing but the violent activity of the players,
+frozen into statuesque attitudes of throwing;
+vigorous figures in, mostly, white, with soft
+red silk sashes. I heard the ball hit, and saw<a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a>
+it rolling out of play; and then, with some
+slight realization of the rapidity of its flight,
+I was able to follow the course from cesta to
+wall and floor.</p>
+
+<p>There had never been, I was certain, another
+game in which instantaneous judgment,
+skill, and endurance had been carried to such
+a far point. There was seldom a fault or error;
+the ball, flying like a bullet, was caught
+and flung with a single gesture; again and
+again it carried from one end wall to the
+other, from which it was hurled on. Angles
+of flight were calculated and controlled, the
+long side wall was utilized.... Then a
+player of the Azules was hit in the ankle, and
+the abruptness with which he went down
+showed me a possibility I had ignored.</p>
+
+<p>During this the clamor of the audience was
+indescribable, made up, for the most part, of
+the difficulties of constantly shifting odds and
+betting. The odds changed practically with
+every passage of the ball: opening at, say,
+five to three against the favorites, as they drew
+steadily ahead in a game of twenty-five points<a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a>
+it jumped to eight to four, ten to three, anything
+that could be placed. On the floor a
+small company of bookmakers, distinguished
+by their scarlet caps, shouted in every direction,
+and betting paper was thrown adroitly
+through the air in hollow rubber balls. Those
+who had backed at favorable odds the team
+now far ahead were yelling jubilantly, and
+others were trying, at the expense of their
+lungs, to cover by hedging their probable
+losses.</p>
+
+<p>There was, however, toward what should
+have been the end, an unlooked-for development&mdash;the
+team apparently hopelessly behind
+crept up. An astounded pause followed, and
+then an uproar rose that cast the former sound
+into insignificance. Soon the score was practically
+tied: there were shrill entreaties, basso
+curses, a storm of indiscriminate insults.
+Now the backers of the lesser couple scrambled
+vocally to take advantage of the betting
+opportunities forever lost&mdash;the odds were
+even, then depressed on the other side. When
+the game was over the noise died instantly:<a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a>
+men black with passion, shaking with rage,
+crushing their hats or with lifted clenched
+fists, at once conversed with smiling affability.
+My eyes had been badly strained, and I was
+glad to leave the box and stroll along the
+promenade. The betting counters were
+jammed by the owners of winning tickets, the
+men behind the bar were, in their own way,
+as active as the pelota players.</p>
+
+<p>The majority of the boxes were occupied
+by Cuban families, but yet there was an appreciable
+number of foreigners. A slender
+girl, in a low dinner dress, was sitting on the
+railing of her box, swinging a graceful slipper
+and smoking a cigarette&mdash;New York was indelibly
+stamped on her&mdash;and, among the masculine
+world of Spanish antecedents, she created
+a frank center of interest. For her part,
+she studied the crowd quite blocking the way
+below her with a cold indifference, the personification
+of young assured arrogance.</p>
+
+<p>A quiniela followed, with six contestants,
+one against the other in successive pairs; but
+my eyes were now definitely exhausted by the<a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a>
+necessarily shifting gaze, and my interest fastened
+on the woman beside me. She was at
+once intimately attached to the people with her
+and abstracted in bearing: a woman not far
+from fifty, but graceful still and, in a flexible
+black silk crêpe with a broad girdle of jet, still
+desirable. It seemed to me that, in spite of an
+admirable manner, she was a little impatient
+at the volubility around her; or it might be,
+in contradiction to this, she was exercising a
+patience based on fortitude. It was clear that
+she hadn't a great deal in common with the
+man who had evidently been married to her
+for a considerable length of years. They
+spoke little&mdash;it was he who had fetched the
+cesta&mdash;both immersed in individual thoughts.
+A woman, I decided, finely sensitive, superior;
+who, as she had grown older, had found no
+demand for the qualities which she knew to
+be her best.</p>
+
+<p>A painful situation, a shocking waste,
+from which, for her, there was no escape, for
+she had patently what was known as character.
+She at once was conscious of the absolute need<a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a>
+for spiritual freedom and bound by commitments
+paramount to her self-esteem. But
+even if she had been more daring, less conscientious,
+what could she have gained; what
+was there for her in a society condemned to
+express the spirit in the terms of flesh? She
+had too much charm, too great a vitality, to be
+absorbed in the superficial affairs of women,
+the substitute life of charity. And once married,
+probably to a man the model of kindly
+faith, she was caught in a desert of sterile
+monotony. Even children, I could see, if
+they existed, had not slain her questioning attractive
+personality.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled at me again, later, her narrow
+slightly wasting hands clasped about a knee&mdash;a
+smile of sympathetic comprehension and unquenchable
+woman. She would have been
+happier chattering in the obvious strain of
+stupidity behind her: any special beauty was
+always paid for in the imposed loneliness of a
+spoken or unspoken surrounding resentment.
+To be content with a facile compliment, the
+majority of tricks at auction bridge, mechanical<a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a>
+pleasures, was the measure of wisdom for
+women in her situation. The last quiniela
+over, plainly weary she gathered a cloak about
+her shoulders and left the box, without, as I
+had hoped, some last gesture or even a word:
+and I pictured her sitting listlessly, distraught,
+in the café to which they were proceeding.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>The pelota immediately vanished from my
+mind before the infinitely more fundamental
+and interesting problem of marriage; and&mdash;remembering
+the ominous sign of a woman's
+club on the Malecón&mdash;I wondered if the Cuban
+women were contented with the tradition
+as it had been handed down to them. In the
+life that I knew in the north, an infinitesimal
+grain of sand irritating in the body of the
+United States, the sacredness of matrimony
+had waned very seriously; it would, of course,
+go on, probably for ever, since no other arrangement
+could be thought of conciliating
+the necessities of both dreams and property;
+but, subjected to the scrutiny of intelligence<a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a>
+rather than sentimentality, it seemed both impotent
+and foolish. The impotence certainly,
+for whereas my grandfather had thirteen children
+and my mother four&mdash;or was it five?&mdash;I
+had none. There had always been individuals
+unrestrained by the complicated oaths of
+the wedding service&mdash;a strictly legal proceeding
+to which the church had been permitted to
+add its furbelows&mdash;dissatisfied ladies, and gentlemen
+of the commercial road. I wasn't referring
+to them, but to the look, at once puzzled,
+humorous, and impatient, that lately I
+had seen wives of probity turn on their husbands.</p>
+
+<p>They expressed the conviction that the
+purely masculine aphorism to the effect that
+home was the place for women meant nothing
+more than a clearing of the decks for unrestricted
+action. This was beautifully displayed,
+confirmed, in Havana, where decks
+were without a single impediment; and I speculated
+about the attitude of the Cuban women
+in houses barred with both actual and metaphorical
+iron. Tradition weighed heavily on<a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a>
+their outlook; but there was that club on the
+Malecón. Tradition had bound the farm
+wives of Pennsylvania, yet they were progressively
+rebelling against the insanity of endless
+labor and isolation. But, perversely, the married
+groups I saw in Havana were remarkably
+close, simple, and happy. They sat in rows
+at the concerts on the plazas, went off on small
+excursions, in entire harmony&mdash;a thing impossible
+to the born American, with whom such
+parties began in exasperation and ended in
+nervous exhaustion. An American husband,
+of the class largely evident in Havana, escorted
+his family abroad with truculence and
+an air of shame at being exposed in such a
+ridiculous situation. If there was more than
+one household implicated, the men invariably
+drew away together: there was a predominance
+of cursing and the wails of irritably
+smacked children. The truth was that the citizens
+of the United States, in their feverish
+passage through life, had decidedly a poor
+time&mdash;either restlessness or ambition or dissatisfaction
+destroyed their peace of mind.<a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a>
+Labor, more highly paid than at any other
+place or time, got less satisfaction for its
+money than a Cuban mestizo with a peseta.</p>
+
+<p>My thoughts returned abruptly to the point
+where they had started, to marriage, and I
+hoped that Cuba wouldn't be disorganized by
+the present ferment; that the feminine element,
+discovering their wrongs, wouldn't leave their
+balconies and patios for the dusty publicity of
+the street. Already a decline had been suffered,
+first in the loss of mantillas and combs,
+next in the passing of single-horse victorias for
+unrestrained tin locomotives, and then in the
+hideous flood of electric lighting. Still, a
+great deal of the charm, the empire, of Havana
+women remained; while nothing but utter
+disaster approached them from the north.</p>
+
+<p>This was no new position for me, and it had
+never failed to be attacked, usually with the
+insinuation that, spiritually, I was part of
+Turkey in Asia ... a place of gardens where
+it was not inconceivable that I'd be happy:
+certainly the politics there were no worse than
+those to which I had been inured from birth,<a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a>
+with murder on the streets at noon distinguished
+by a white ribbon in its buttonhole.
+The Armenians were no more precariously situated
+than the Albigenses under Innocent III.
+I had heard, as well, that the governments of
+Cuba had not been free from suspicion, but it
+was hoped that elections supervised from the
+United States would institute reform. Rare
+irony! Elections, I should have said, going
+back once more to the beginning, opening to
+emancipated women.</p>
+
+<p>Gathering, in imagination, all the feminine
+world of Havana into a fragrant assembly, I
+begged them not to separate themselves from
+their privileges; I implored them even&mdash;against
+my personal inclination, for there, at
+least, I was no Turk&mdash;not to grow slender, if
+that meant agile excursions into loud spheres
+of lesser influence. Those others, I proceeded,
+would rapturously exchange a ballot
+for a seductive ankle, a graceful breast, or a
+flawless complexion. Complexion, or rather
+its absence, brought immeasurably more supporting
+votes to the women's party than convictions.<a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a>
+And I added, reprehensibly, some
+of the things I had been privately told, as a
+writer, by women newly in the professions:
+I exposed the secret of a lecturer on civic improvement&mdash;or
+it might have been better babies;
+I couldn't recall which&mdash;who carried a
+handbagful of apostrophies to Paolo and
+Francesca, and that illogical lot, on her travels.
+She permitted me to read them in a
+sunny orchard where the apples were already,
+more than ripe, on the ground; and her gaze
+had persistently strayed to the wasting fruit.</p>
+
+<p>The audience melted away&mdash;I was unable to
+discover if they were flattered or annoyed&mdash;and
+I found myself actually seated at one of
+the small tables on the fringe of the thé dansant
+at the Sevilla. The Cascade Orchestra from
+the Biltmore, their necks hung with the imitation
+wreaths of Hawaii, were playing a musical
+pastiche of many lands and a single purpose;
+and there, foxtrotting intently among
+girls from the New York Follies and girls on
+follies of their own, colliding with race track
+touts from Jefferson Park and suave predatory<a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a>
+gentlemen of San Francisco, I found a whole
+section of young Cuba.</p>
+
+<p>They returned, in the intermissions, to chaperons
+complacent or secretly disturbed, where
+they had, principally, refrescos; but their attitude
+was one of progress and conscious, patronizing
+superiority to old-fashioned customs.
+The daughters of what, in many aspects, was
+the Spanish-Cuban aristocracy of the island,
+were dancing publicly in a hotel. Here, already,
+was an example of emancipation. I
+disliked it, naturally, not on moral grounds,
+but because it foreshadowed the destruction
+of individuality, the loss, eventually, of Havana,
+of Cuba, of Spain ... of everything
+distinguished that saved the world from monotony.</p>
+
+<p>They danced&mdash;the Cuban youth&mdash;with notable
+facility, adding to the hesitation waltz
+something specially their own, a more intense
+rhythm, a greater potentiality; their bodies
+were at once more fluid and positive; they
+were swept up into a mood unknown to the
+adamant ornaments of Country Club verandas<a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a>
+in the north. A cosmopolitan waiter,
+anxious to have me finish and move on, hovered
+about the table, ignorant of a traditional
+courtesy as well as of the requirements of the
+climate. All the objectionable features of
+Broadway cafés, of public ostentation, mingled
+servility and insolence, dishonesty&mdash;my
+piña colado was diluted beyond taste&mdash;were
+being flung, with the air of a favor, into Havana.
+Although, for the best, I was even then
+a little late, I was glad that I had seen the city
+when I did, just as I was glad to have known
+Venice before the Campanile fell, and the
+Virginia Highlands when they had not been
+modernized. The change of Havana within
+itself, from palm thatch to marble, was entrancing;
+but the arbitrary imposition of stupid
+habits, standards, conduct, from outside,
+damnable.</p>
+
+<p>In the end the waiter was more forceful
+than my determination to remain until my
+drink and thoughts were at an end, and I rose
+with them uncompleted, in a very ill temper.
+If Cuba hadn't enough innate taste and nationality<a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a>
+to save herself, she must go the popular
+way to obliteration. So much else had gone!
+But later, at the Hotel de Luz, untouched yet
+by the hand of imported cupidity, my happiness
+in Havana returned.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>The Hotel de Luz, inimitably Cuban, with
+the shipping lying vaguely 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<a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;it resembled exactly one of his
+sere vertiginous engravings. Yet it was, I
+knew, the favorite hotel of travelers from the
+Canary Islands.</p>
+
+<p>Continuing to rock slightly and smoke, I
+pursued the extremely recondite subject of
+just such impressions as I had there received:<a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The reality of what I felt, then, lay in the
+combining of the surroundings and my imagination&mdash;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<a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a>
+signally, both profoundly and superficially&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;in a sphere not
+dominated by hymnology&mdash;but, skeptical of
+the future, all I possessed, my sole ideal, was a
+passionate admiration for the courage of a humanity<a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a>
+condemned to the loss of warm life.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 Cristóbal de la Habana.<a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the
+colored glass above a window,
+the sugar at the bottom of a cocktail&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a>
+called A Preface of Imperishable Trifles;
+but the realization that I had begun in that
+manner&mdash;a suspicious circumstance in a novel,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>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 Malecón. 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&mdash;a gesture of Spain finally submerged
+in the western seas of skepticism.</p>
+
+<p>I was extraordinarily grateful to her for
+standing wrapped with the shawl in immobile<a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a>
+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
+façades 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&mdash;the
+Promenade des Bastions and La Treille, the
+Cité 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<a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a>
+carré, had long ago been emptied of their
+flowered muslins.</p>
+
+<p>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 Malecón
+looked out, conversely, across the unbroken
+tide of the sea&mdash;in the afternoon, when
+it was fair, a magical sweep of unutterable
+blue. Yet they had suffered a decline&mdash;as
+though the constant noise of automobiles had
+rent an evanescent spirit.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a>
+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&mdash;I had just missed it&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a>
+French nor Spanish, but American. Some of
+them, I knew, had been at school in New
+York&mdash;probably Miss Spence's, where balconies
+were not cultivated&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a>
+struggle, must conquer&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Widely different balconies held my attention&mdash;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 cafés on the ground,
+whose balconies, exposed to an intolerable
+heat, overlooked dingy sun-baked fields.
+They were always empty.... I could never<a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a>
+imagine their use&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a>
+were invariably empty, their purpose, it was
+plain, mistrusted.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a>
+imagine them dimly lighted and flooded
+with perfume, with the scent of magnolias and
+the whisper of the fountains.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the subdued
+harshness of mechanical music, the echoes of
+that dissatisfaction which was everywhere now
+recognized as improvement. I demanded
+guitars.</p>
+
+<p>The masculine chords of the guitar, the least
+sentimental of instruments, as the Spaniards
+were the least sentimental of people, the deep<a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a>
+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 Cabañas 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+Cubeños, dead in the mines of Cobre, were
+being revenged for the usurpation of their
+happiness and land; the negroes of the slave<a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a></p>
+
+<p>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 Cubeños 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a>
+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&mdash;no one had
+charged me with an historical novel.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;they'd have to&mdash;go to the devil; for I
+had my own honesty to serve, my own plot to
+tend&mdash;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.<a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a></p>
+
+<p>Or, in Havana, of the oranges. In the
+meanwhile the patios gave me an 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.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>That, evidently, was not characteristic of
+Havana, and yet the city absorbed it, made it a
+part of a complex richness, a complexity as<a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the real
+prudes&mdash;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<a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a>
+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&mdash;all the ghastly appendages
+of religious undertaking&mdash;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.<a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a></p>
+
+<p>The cemetery from which I escaped with
+relief and the café that I entered with pleasure&mdash;again
+the Telegrafo&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a>
+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 Larrañaga,
+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.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>There were, of course, men who disagreed
+with me&mdash;though women never liked a Cabañas
+or Henry Clay cigarette&mdash;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<a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;the detail most important
+to a mental picture and always missing&mdash;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.<a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 cafés 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.</p>
+
+<p>An amusing convention, a prejudice really;<a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The Turkish cigarettes in Havana were unremarkable,
+yet, for the Cuban youth, the
+sign of worldliness. They disdained the local<a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>In the past I had suffered a particularly
+wretched nervous breakdown&mdash;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<a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a>
+hurt someone else failed to excite me&mdash;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&mdash;of
+tobacco heart if necessary.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<a name="page_141" id="page_141"></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.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>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 malagueña, just as the foreign operatic
+variations on Spanish themes were reminted<a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a>
+in a smooth and debased universal
+coin.</p>
+
+<p>I purchased a ridiculously flimsy scrap of
+paper, which, I was assured, made me the possessor
+of a grille principal at the Pairet
+Theatre&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a>
+was bad, but a revista&mdash;I could think of nothing
+else to call it&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the art of which they so daringly
+comprehended&mdash;that their effect was lost in<a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a>
+mass. The display, the extravagant settings
+and costumes, of Arco-Iris, were, throughout,
+mechanical; the coryphées 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;his manner
+brightened&mdash;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.<a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I liked everything about him but his indulgence
+for soda blondes; yet in the serious conversation
+we at once opened&mdash;connected with
+a projected trip of mine to the City of Mexico&mdash;we
+forgot the girl until, exasperated by our
+neglect, she lost some of her manner in an inane
+exclamation made, she announced, for the<a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Their origins were as mysterious as their
+age&mdash;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&mdash;I had seen them before
+at expensive fishing camps&mdash;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<a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a>&mdash;the
+granite women on the wall
+of the Gallego Club.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>My interest, however, in the American in
+Havana had vanished, my 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
+cafés 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.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this manner that I found ear-rings<a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a>
+which I secured with a sense of treasure&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I was paying for some towels, and regretting&mdash;in
+a singular composite of inappropriate
+words and banal smiles&mdash;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 Nuñez: they were of pale hand-carved
+and drawn gold, aged gold as yellow<a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a>
+as a lemon&mdash;one pair of open circles an
+inch in diameter, with seed pearls; the other
+the shape of small delicate leaves, with pearls
+and topazes.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_152" id="page_152"></a>
+and which had given me, perhaps, as great
+pleasure as anything I had seen on the stage.
+But not so much for the singing&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 crêpe-de-chine,
+the weight of its embroidery, the
+beautiful knotting of the short fringe&mdash;long
+fringe was an error&mdash;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<a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a>
+their heavy folds when a third mantone was
+produced burning with all the gorgeous and
+violent colors imaginable.</p>
+
+<p>It was, I suppose, magenta&mdash;a magenta of a
+depth and wickedness impossible for any but
+Eastern dye; the magenta of a great blossom
+of hell&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Oppressed by a sense of monetary insanity
+not unfamiliar to me&mdash;I was very apt to buy
+an Airedale terrier or a consol table with the
+sum carefully gathered for an absolute necessity&mdash;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&mdash;Doloretes&mdash;would
+be important to my plan.<a name="page_155" id="page_155"></a>
+Yes, my young figure and his fellows would
+go nightly to see her dance.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;I had wanted no paramount
+women in the first place&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>A remarkably good story, I thought enthusiastically;
+and I fell to speculating if George
+Lorimer would print it. He would give it, I<a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a>
+told myself, a wide margin of chance; but,
+in writing, uncomfortable necessities often
+turned up in the course of narrative&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>It was a thing of total indifference to me
+what&mdash;with steel spurs or without&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I had to leave my cab for an informal way
+behind some buildings and across grass, and,
+as I approached a false stucco façade, a determined<a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a>
+ringing crowing filled the air. Beyond
+the arched entrance there was an area
+of pavement with tables and a limited café
+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&mdash;as at the pelota&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>It was deafening&mdash;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<a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a>
+they hit the sawdust there was a clash as of
+metal. The methods of their backers were
+different&mdash;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&mdash;they
+were badly matched and the main no affair
+at all&mdash;his pallid face flushed and he suggested
+new atrocities to his champion.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;he
+possessed but eleven dollars and
+odd pesetas.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;settlers
+of at least forty-eight hours&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the brown bird of the
+brother of Menocal flashed forward, launched
+himself into the air with a clash, and drove<a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Money won at sheer gambling, at games of
+chance which involved no personal skill or
+effort, always seemed hardly short of miraculous
+to me&mdash;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<a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a>
+gold and treasury paper. But with that exception,
+and for some small amounts, I was unlucky.
+The occasion just past was an illustration&mdash;I
+was never really disastrously overtaken,
+but equally I never reached sensational
+heights.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I made, however, some effort to find a billiard<a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>But the men of Havana, it seemed, were
+quite contented to talk, to sit in a café 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,<a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a>
+no one, to-day, took his politics seriously.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a>
+descended to the ñañigos.... 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.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;walking to get rid of the stiffness of<a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a>
+long sitting&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The approved style was white plaster, a
+story and a half high, with an impressive portico&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>That, it seemed to me, would not carry his
+mind toward his dwelling, his wife grown inordinately<a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a>
+fat, and their three daughters, all
+long ago asleep; no, it would send his thoughts
+backward, over the way he had come&mdash;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&mdash;in the
+general direction, too, of the cemetery.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;but
+only after he spent an evening on the cold<a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a>
+iron chair of a plaza&mdash;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 Corazón
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;young&mdash;that
+dangerous company had given a dance on
+the last Thursday of every month, except when<a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>The girls of those days had a&mdash;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 cafés: 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&mdash;that had disappeared
+more utterly than anything else: he was more<a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a>
+than a little vague in meaning; his romance
+was an indefinite state; the glow, in reality, of
+his own youth.</p>
+
+<p>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 Cabañas 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.<a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a></p>
+
+<p>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 Marío
+Turafa, his friend, in hiding, to the Spanish
+Government. It was said that Marío 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:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align="left">"Clavales, clavales</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp; de mi Andalucía!</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp; Mujeres, mujeres&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp; de la Patria mia!"</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>My mind returned once more to Rogelio
+Mola as I was standing outside an impassive<a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>What was before me, in a world where the
+pure and the impure were inexplicably mixed
+in one flesh, was inevitable; its ugliness lay<a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a>
+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&mdash;the justice and
+sympathy, the comprehension, of my being.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a>
+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&mdash;yes, Rogelio in his youth&mdash;their
+hair faultlessly glossy, were more animated;
+their gestures and voices rose irrepressibly
+and sank in confidences to ears close beside
+them.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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,<a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a>
+the thick, the suffocating armor of triviality
+that criminally and ludicrously muffled
+life.</p>
+
+<p>There were present, of course, all the poses
+of humanity, and a great many of its conventions;
+the girls were not hippogriffs, but girls&mdash;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<a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a>
+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&mdash;as it was, dealing with only the
+outer garments of fact, I had been accused of
+lasciviousness or something of the kind&mdash;and I
+envied the French the cool logic of their mentality,
+the cultivation of the French audience.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a>
+with disembodied purity. He had
+set up, in his heart and in his books, the high
+altar of mediæval Platonism&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>The ladies of pleasure&mdash;the merest identifying
+phrase, since, in the first place, they were
+practically all at the age of immaturity&mdash;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<a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a>
+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&mdash;they
+were faithful to the traditions of their
+latitude&mdash;and there was no positive Africa;
+but there was Africa in faint dilutions, in attenuations
+traced from lands remote as Tartary:</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;its
+authenticity unmistakable in a strong
+vivid sheen&mdash;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<a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a>
+imagination could have pictured such a striking
+figure nor placed her so exactly in the ultimate
+setting:</p>
+
+<p>Here she was artificial&mdash;there were long jet
+ear-rings against her neck&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever my feelings should have been,
+there was no doubt that&mdash;if for the extreme
+pictorial quality alone&mdash;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&mdash;the youngest&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>I had a vision of appearing with her
+wrapped in a frivolous cloak, before the experienced<a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a>
+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. Lainé 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>There was a girl with a trace of Chinese in
+the flattened oval of her countenance, and<a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the girls about were not her friends&mdash;but
+she had qualities, aspects, infinitely preferable
+to a flow of words. I should have<a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a>
+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&mdash;to
+put her in such colors, such surroundings, as
+would infinitely multiply her mystery.</p>
+
+<p>It was, I realized, time for me to leave&mdash;I
+wasn't Rogelio Mola in his youth&mdash;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&mdash;the bleached
+soul of Africa with massed red hair; a frivolity
+of yellow ribbons against a silver tormented<a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a>
+task so easy that it was successfully performed
+by three quarters of the fools on earth.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>An extremely bad period, that, when I tried
+to write without knowledge or support, reaching
+from twenty until well after thirty, when
+I managed to sell a scrap of prose. From then
+until forty the time had gone in a flash, a
+scratching of the pen: it seemed incredible that
+the seven books on a shelf bearing my name
+had been the result of so brief, so immaterial,<a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a>
+a time. Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba,
+gazing peacefully into the dim expensive space
+of a room in the Hotel Inglaterra, congratulating
+myself on the loss, the positive lapse,
+of what was called men's most valuable possession.</p>
+
+<p>No better place for the trying of my sincerity
+than Havana existed; no other city in
+the world could so perfectly create the illusion
+of complete irresponsibility, of happiness
+followed for its own sake, as an end, or as the
+means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and
+plazas and promenades, its alternating sparkle
+and languor, like flags whipping in the wind or
+drooping about their staffs, always conveyed
+a spirit of holiday and of a whole absence of
+splenetic censure. At the bottom of this the
+climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days
+and nights stirring with a breeze through the
+galleries, concentrated the mind and body on
+pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>Night had always been the time for gaiety,
+when the practical was veiled in shade; and
+Havana responded with an inimitable grace<a name="page_197" id="page_197"></a>
+to the stars. It was constructed for night, like
+a lunar park of marble and palms and open
+flooding radiance; with, against that, streets
+packed with darkness and doors of mystery to
+which clung the faint breath of patchouli.
+The air was instinct with seduction, faintly
+touched by the pungency of Ron Bacardi and
+limes, and bland with the vapors of delightful
+cigars. The clothes, too&mdash;the white linens
+and flannels and silks of the men; the ruffled
+dresses on the balconies, the flowery laces, like
+white carnations, in the automobiles; the wide
+hats of Paris and the satin slippers tied about
+the ankles, with preposterous heels; the fluttering
+fans&mdash;all, all were in the key of light
+sharp emotion, of challenge and invitation and
+surrender.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana,
+any philosophy in the face of that charm, was
+unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a
+farther development of this, tacitly left to my
+own devices and thoughts, as if there were a
+general perception of my remoteness from the
+affair in hand. I was suffered to come and go<a name="page_198" id="page_198"></a>
+without notice; no one, much, spoke to me;
+even those not unaware of the possibility of a
+book, of San Cristóbal de la Habana, in which
+their city would find praise, were hardly
+stirred to interest. The moment to go to Havana
+was youth, the moment for masked balls
+and infidelity and champagne: its potency for
+me lay in its investment of memories; I regarded
+it as a spectacle set in the tropics. I
+was an onlooker and not a participant. But I
+had, as I have shown, no regret; I had become
+reconciled not only to the fleetness of time, but
+equally to the fact that my rôle was necessarily
+a spectator's. Hour after hour, year after
+year, I sat writing at the low window which
+looked out over my green terrace and clipped
+hedge, to the road, to life, beyond.</p>
+
+<p>Above everything, then, I was satisfied with
+the Havana I knew. From the standpoint of
+actuality my comprehension was limited&mdash;I
+was familiar with only a certain narrow part
+of the city, for it was my habit to go back to
+what I had found rather than discover the new&mdash;perhaps
+ten streets and a handful of houses,<a name="page_199" id="page_199"></a>
+parks, and cafés. Too much to get into a
+score of books. What I had lost, I thought
+further&mdash;if, indeed, I had ever possessed it&mdash;was
+a warm personal contact such as I should
+have had dancing with a lovely girl. I never
+danced, but remained outside, philosophically,
+gazing at the long bright whirling rectangles.</p>
+
+<p>At the Inglaterra there were many men
+older than myself who danced persistently and
+had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too,
+wore flowers in their coats, but aggressive and
+not reminiscent blooms. They formed most
+of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't
+much youth among them, but I didn't envy
+them in the slightest. They were, if possible,
+more absurd than the women unmindful of
+thickening waists and dulled eyes. Their
+ardor was febrile and their power money; and
+every time they escorted with a quickened step
+their charmers past young dark men, the
+charmers glanced back appealingly. It was
+different with the Cubans, who regarded such
+things more naturally, and did not, practically,
+in consequence, get drunk.<a name="page_200" id="page_200"></a></p>
+
+<p>The noise from San Rafael Street never
+slackened, the clamor of the mule-drivers and
+the emptying cans of refuse took the place of
+the motor signals; the slats of my lowered shutters
+showed streaks of dawn. I turned once,
+it appeared, and the room was filled with indirect
+sunlight, the hands of my watch were
+at ten. It was eleven before I was dressed,
+with the morning cup of black coffee empty
+on a table; at twelve I had breakfast, and until
+five I idly read. The evening as well was idle&mdash;a
+thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvious
+and active standards. I thought, with no
+impulse to return, of the house near the
+Arsenal, which had, in effect, been open for
+centuries and which, unless life were purified,
+would never close. The purity I meant was
+not a limitation of passion, but its release from
+obscene confines. It didn't matter what I
+meant and, again, I was becoming too serious
+... or not serious about the correct things.
+There was perpetually the danger of being
+overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early
+flight, by the influences, the promptings, of<a name="page_201" id="page_201"></a>
+my heredity and strong first associations.
+What an amazing climax to my records of
+chiffon textures and moods of chiffon that
+would be: shouting the creed of a bitter Scots
+induration from the informal pulpits of the
+streets! Or I might publish, to the dismay of
+every one intimately concerned, a denunciatory
+sermonizing book. But what the subject
+was wouldn't matter, as it had not mattered
+with Jeremy Taylor, if it were written with
+sufficient beauty. Disagreeable books, too, in
+spite of the accepted contrary belief, were
+always very highly esteemed.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>It was easy enough to account for Jeremy
+Taylor by the vague generalization of beauty,
+and I forced myself to a closer scrutiny of that
+term and my meaning. The words beauty
+and love, and a dozen others, like old shoes,
+had grown so shapeless through long mis-wear
+that they would stay on no foot. I tried
+to isolate some quality indisputably recognizable
+as beautiful and hit, to my surprise, on<a name="page_202" id="page_202"></a>
+intellectual courage. The thought of an undeviating
+mental integrity was as exhilarating
+as the crash of massed marching bands.
+Then, searching for another example, I recalled
+August nights at Dower House, with the
+moonlight lying like water between the black
+shadows of the trees on the lawn. There was
+a harsh interwoven shrilling of locusts and
+the echo&mdash;almost the feel rather than the sound&mdash;of
+thunder below the horizon. This, too,
+stirred me profoundly, brought about the glow
+transmutable into creative effort.</p>
+
+<p>Another excursion found nothing but a boy
+and a girl, any boy and any girl, fired by shy
+uncomplicated passion.... A mental, a
+visual, and a natural incentive, each with the
+same effect, the identical pinching of the heart
+and thrust to a common hidden center. What
+had they each alike? Perhaps it was this:
+that they were the three great facts of existence,
+the primary earth, the act of creation,
+and the crowning dignity, the superiority of
+men who, somehow, had transvalued the sum
+of their awarded clay. Somehow! I had no<a name="page_203" id="page_203"></a>
+intention of examining that. The fact was,
+for me, enough.</p>
+
+<p>There was, however, another phase of
+beauty still, one peculiarly the property of
+novelists, which had to do not with life at
+all, but with death, with vain longing and
+memories and failure. All the novels which
+seemed to me of the first rank were constructed
+from these latter qualities; and while
+painting and music and lyrical poetry were
+affirmative, the novel was negative, built,
+where it was great, from great indignations.
+Yet, while this was obvious truth, it failed
+to include or satisfy me; for there were
+many passages not recognizable as great
+in the broadest sense, both in literature
+and life, that filled me with supreme
+pleasure&mdash;there were pages of Turgenev spun
+out of the fragile melancholy of a girl, a girl
+with a soul in dusk, far more enthralling than,
+for example, Thomas Hardy. It may have
+been that there was the perception of a similitude
+between Turgenev's figure and myself;
+certainly I was closer to her mood, her disease<a name="page_204" id="page_204"></a>
+of modernity, than to a sheep herder; and
+there was a possibility, for my own support,
+that the finest-drawn sensibilities, not regarded
+as emotions in the grand key, would turn out
+to be our most highly justified preoccupation.</p>
+
+<p>I was, at present, in Havana, submerged in
+its fascination, and when I came to write about
+it there would not be lacking those to say that
+I had been better occupied with simpler
+things. Hugh Walpole had warned me of
+the danger, to me, of parquetry and vermilion
+Chinese Chippendale; and I was certain that
+he would speak to me again in the same tone
+about idling in a mid-Victorian Pompeii, celebrating
+drink and marble touched by the gilder's
+brush of late afternoon. Perhaps Walpole&mdash;and
+Henry Mencken's keen friendly
+discernment&mdash;was right; but, damn it, my experience
+was deficient in material essentials; I
+was dangerously ignorant of current reality,
+and I doubted if my style was a suitable instrument
+for rugged facts.</p>
+
+<p>What remained for me, an accomplishment
+spacious enough for anyone, was the effort to<a name="page_205" id="page_205"></a>
+realize that sharp sense of beauty which came
+from a firm delicate consciousness of certain
+high pretensions, valors, maintained in the face
+of imminent destruction. And in that category
+none was sharper than the charm of a
+woman, so soon to perish, in a vanity of array
+as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly.
+The thought of such a woman, the essence, the
+distillation, of an art of life superimposed on
+sheer economy, was more moving to me than
+the most heroic maternity. I couldn't get it
+into my head that loveliness, which had a trick
+of staying in the mind at points of death when
+all service was forgotten, was rightly considered
+to be of less importance than the sweat
+of some kitchen drudge.</p>
+
+<p>The setting of a woman in a dress by
+Cheruit; a part of the bravery of fragile soft
+paste Lowestoft china and square emeralds
+that would feed a starving village, on fingers
+that had done no more than wave a fan; the fan
+itself, on gold and ivory with tasselled silk&mdash;the
+things to which the longing of men, elevated
+a degree above hard circumstances,<a name="page_206" id="page_206"></a>
+turned&mdash;were of equal weight with the whole;
+for it was not what the woman had in common
+with a rabbit that was important, but her difference.
+On one hand that difference was
+moral, but on the other æsthetic; and I had
+been absorbed by the latter.</p>
+
+<p>This, however wide apart it may seem, was
+closely bound to my presence in Havana, to
+my delight and purpose there. It was nothing
+more than a statement, a development, if not
+a final vindication, of my instant sense of
+pleasure and familiarity&mdash;a place already
+alive in my imagination. My special difficulty
+was the casting of it into a recognizable,
+adequate medium. There, in the plaiting
+of cobwebs instead of hemp rope, I particularly
+invited disaster. It wasn't necessary
+that I should sustain anyone, but only that
+I should spread the illusion of the buried associations
+and image of a brain. That, if it
+were true, I held, would be beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Here, at least, I was serious about the correct
+things, direct rather than conventional;
+all that mattered was the spreading of the illusion,<a name="page_207" id="page_207"></a>
+the spectacle of what part of Havana I
+did know interpreted, realized, not in the
+spirit of an architectural plan, but as sentient
+with reflected emotions. Otherwise the most
+weighty charges against me were absolutely
+justified. If I couldn't make Havana respond
+in the key of my intrinsic feelings, if I had no
+authentic feeling with which to invest it, my
+book, almost all my books, were a weariness
+and a mistake.</p>
+
+<p>Novels of indignation or of melancholy,
+of a longing for the continuity of individual
+passion confronted with the inevitable&mdash;it was
+that, the perishability of all that was desirable,
+which gave to small things, a flower in the
+hair, their importance as symbols. The love
+story, once the exclusive province of fiction,
+had disappeared; it was now practically impossible
+for the slightest talent to fill a book
+in that manner. The romantic figment, like
+a confection of spun sugar with a sprig of artificial
+orange blossoms, had been discarded; the
+beauty of love, it had been discovered, wasn't
+the possession of a particular heart, but the<a name="page_208" id="page_208"></a>
+tenderness, the pity, that came from the realization
+of its inescapable loss. No man could
+love a woman, no woman could love a man,
+who was to live forever; a thousand years
+would be an insuperable burden. The higher
+a cultivation, a delight, reached, the more
+tragic was its breaking by death; the greater
+knowledge a mind held, the more humiliating
+was the illimitable ignorance, the profound
+night pressing in upon every feeble and temporary
+human lamp.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write,
+were composed, now, not so much from among
+the brasses, the tympani, as from the violins.
+The great majority, like the great books, were
+dedicated to the primary chords; but my
+reaching the former had been always hopeless.
+I didn't mind this, for I told myself
+that, while the structure of approbation I had
+gathered was comparatively modest, its stones
+and masonry were admirable; it was, if not a
+mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on
+earth&mdash;what was in England called, I believe,
+a freehold. It was mine, and there was no<a name="page_209" id="page_209"></a>
+lease dependent on the good will&mdash;or on my
+subserviency&mdash;of any landlord.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>Most of this went through my mind as I sat
+looking at my trunk, open on end in an alcove
+near the door, for I was gathering my clothes
+and thoughts in preparation for leaving Havana.
+One thing only that I wished to see
+now remained&mdash;the danzon at the National
+Theatre. I kept out a dark suit, one that
+would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's
+box; for I had been told that it was desirable
+to avoid unnecessary attention. There was,
+briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted&mdash;I
+had heard the same thing so often before
+without subsequent justification&mdash;but I could
+believe it possible if there was any violent discharge
+of primitive emotion. Here the spirit
+of Africa burned remote and pale, but it was
+still a tropical incomprehensible flame.</p>
+
+<p>A strip of red carpet led from the outer
+steps, across a large promenade, to the circular
+wall of the theatre; and though it was past<a name="page_210" id="page_210"></a>
+eleven, the ball hadn't yet assumed an appearance
+of life. But just within the entrance a
+negro band began suddenly to play, and in the
+music alone I immediately found the potent
+actuality of danger. I was without the knowledge
+necessary to the disentangling of its elements:
+there were fiddles and horns and unnatural
+kettle drums, and an instrument made
+from a long gourd, with a parallel scoring for
+the scrape of a stick. The music was first a
+shock, then an exasperation hardly to be borne,
+but finally it assumed a rhythm maddening
+beyond measure.</p>
+
+<p>It was Africa and something else&mdash;notes
+taken from the Moors, splitting quavers of
+Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that
+might have been the agonized voice of the first
+Cubeños; with an unspeakable distortion, a
+crazy adaptation, of scraps of to-day. There
+was no pause, no beginning or end, in its
+form; it went on and on and on, rising and falling,
+fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and
+then a blasting discord&mdash;the savage naked utterance<a name="page_211" id="page_211"></a>
+of a naked savage lust; it was a music
+not of passion, but of the frenzy of rape.
+Nothing like it would have been possible in
+writing, allowed in painting; only music was
+free to express, to sound, such depths.
+Nothing but music could have conveyed the
+inarticulate cries of the stirred mire that
+flooded the marble space of the opera house.
+It had lost the simplicity of its appropriate
+years, the spring orgies in the clearings of
+early forests; time had made it hideously
+menacing, cynical, and corrupt.</p>
+
+<p>At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro
+woman with a wheedling tainted manner tried
+to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger
+and pale, their faces coated with rice powder,
+went past in dragging satins. They were
+chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened
+cheeks and dead-looking mat-like hair, their
+coffee-colored breasts and white kid gloves,
+gave them an extraordinary incongruity;
+and behind them, as sharp as the whisper of
+their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered.<a name="page_212" id="page_212"></a>
+Leaning forward on the rail of my enclosure,
+I gazed down over the floored expanse of the
+auditorium:</p>
+
+<p>The stage was set with the backdrop and
+wings of a conventional operatic design&mdash;a
+scene that would have served equally Aïda or
+La Favorita: it towered, like a faded dream
+of pseudo-classic Havana, into the theatrical
+heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and
+charcoal grey, of loggias and peristyles and
+fountains; while in close order about its three
+sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live
+border of dancers. They were of every color
+from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster,
+to utter blackness. The men, for the most
+part, were light, some purely Spanish, the
+negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I
+could see no indisputably white women.
+There was a girl in a mantone of bright contrasting
+colors, a high comb and a rose in her
+hair, about whom there was a question. However,
+her partner was one of the few full negroes
+there; and, as they revolved below my
+box, it seemed that her skin had a leaden cast.<a name="page_213" id="page_213"></a></p>
+
+<p>The danzon itself had, at first, the appearance
+of a sustained gravity: it was danced
+slowly, in very small space, following the
+music with arbitrary reverses, and pausing.
+There might have been, to the superficial
+view, a restraint almost approaching dignity
+had the dancers been other. The men, without
+exception, wore their stiff straw hats and
+smoked cigars through every evolution; and
+the dresses, the dressing, of the women were
+fantastic: a small wasted girl, dryly black, had
+copied the color and petals of a sunflower. As
+she revolved, her skirt flared out from legs
+like bent bones, and a hat of raw yellow
+flapped across her grotesque ebony countenance.</p>
+
+<p>The danzon, for a moment, in spite of the
+music played continuously and alternately by
+two orchestras occupying a box on either side
+of the stage, seemed formal. Then, abruptly,
+a couple lost every restraint, and their maddened
+spinning and furious hips tore the illusion
+to shreds. And slowly I began to be conscious
+of a poisonous air, a fetid air as palpable<a name="page_214" id="page_214"></a>
+as the odors and scents&mdash;the breath, the premonition,
+of the danger of which I had been
+warned. It lay in an ugly hysteria of rasped
+emotions that at any illogical accident might
+burst into the shrillness of a knife. It wasn't
+dangerous so much as it was abjectly wicked&mdash;the
+deliberate calling up of sooty shapes that
+had better be kept buried. It was unimportant
+that the men below me were, in the daytime,
+commonplace clerks; the women could
+be anything chance had made them: here, to
+the spoiled magic of Carabalíe nights, they
+were evoking a ceremonial of horror.</p>
+
+<p>Personally, since I had no hopes to save or
+plans to protect, I hadn't the desire, like Sampson,
+to pull down the pillars of the roof on
+their debased heads. I enjoyed it remarkably;
+the more because I saw, scattered among the
+crowd, figures of unreal and detrimental
+beauty&mdash;a creamy magnificence in creamy
+satin with a silver band on her forehead; a yellow
+creature with oblique eyes in twenty white
+flounces and a natural garland of purple
+flowers; a thing of ink, of basalt carved by an<a name="page_215" id="page_215"></a>
+opulent chisel, on whose body clothes were
+incidental; and corrupt graces perfect in
+youth and figure weaving the patterns, the wisdom,
+of Sodom.</p>
+
+<p>One o'clock passed, then two and three, but
+there was no abatement in the danzon. A
+middle-aged man, with an abstracted air,
+danced without stopping for an hour and fifty
+minutes. His partner, flushing through her
+dark skin, was expensively habited: her fingers
+and throat glittered coldly with diamonds
+and her hat was swept with long dipping
+plumes. She had a malignant mouth and eyes
+a thick muddy brown, and it was clear that she
+hated the man in whose arms she was turning.
+I wondered about her hatred and the patience,
+the indifference, of the other: how revolting
+she would be in a few hours, livid and ghastly
+in the morning. He, probably, would then be
+standing at a high desk, counting dollars with
+integrity or adding columns of figures, precise
+and respectable in an alpaca coat. An older
+man still was dancing by himself, intent on the
+intricate stepping of his own feet. His agility<a name="page_216" id="page_216"></a>
+soon won an admiring circle, and his violence
+increased with the applause: he jumped in the
+air, clapping his heels together, and his arms
+waved wildly&mdash;a marionette pulled convulsively
+by wires in strange merciless hands.</p>
+
+<p>I imagined a fetish, a large god, on the
+stage, drooping over his swollen belly, with a
+hanging lip and hands set in his loins. His
+legs were folded, lost in flesh ... a squatting
+smeared trunk of hideous service. Around
+him were the seated rows of worshippers, on
+either hand was his jangling praise; and before
+him revolved the dancers in his rite. The
+music throbbed in my brain like a madness
+that would have dragged me down to the floor.
+I speculated fleetly over such a surrender, the
+drop, through countless ages, of that possible
+descent.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>It was, however, only just to add that the
+idol of Guinea suffered unduly from his surroundings
+and the age in which he was exposed;
+in his place, his time, he had been
+neither a monster nor unnatural, but nothing<a name="page_217" id="page_217"></a>
+more than the current form of worship. He,
+Bongó, had had the misfortune to be catapulted,
+together with his congregation,
+through twenty, forty, centuries, in a breath,
+on the magic carpet of greed, and put down
+in a day where he was not only obsolete, but
+repudiated. Men saw him with the sense of
+horror generated by a blasting view of their
+own very much earlier selves. For the difference
+between the negro, the Carabalíes, or
+Macua, and the Spaniards of the sixteenth
+century in Cuba was, at heart, historical in
+time only. They were members&mdash;we were all
+members&mdash;of one family. The innocence of
+a bare black, torn like a creeper from the support
+of his native tree, tatooed with necessary
+charms, medicines, against jungle fears and
+fevers, had more to dread from Amador de
+Lares than any later Christians owed to an
+arbitrarily imported savagery. What, in reality,
+occurred, was implied on the wide floor
+of the opera house, was that the negroes, unable
+to change their simplicity as easily as
+they superficially diluted their skins, kept their<a name="page_218" id="page_218"></a>
+innocent habits, their tastes in noise and religion
+and misconduct; but, in the dress of
+civilization, these took on the aspect of a grotesque
+defiled horror. With this, too, in an
+earnest effort to assimilate as much as possible
+of their enforced land, they caught such bright
+fragments of life as struck them&mdash;the glass
+beads and bits of gay cloth&mdash;and copied them
+prodigiously. The confusion which followed
+was a tragedy in the comic spirit&mdash;a discordant
+mingling that provoked laughter, quickly
+stopped by a deeper understanding and by
+pity. The past vital still: with the entrance
+of the African slave into the West, it was exactly
+as though a figure in the paint and
+feathers of voodoo had been thrust into a
+polite salon.</p>
+
+<p>The spectacle had none of the comfortable
+features of a mere exhibition; for the revulsion
+came from a spiritual shudder in the beings
+of the onlookers; while the other injured individuals
+saw that, as clothes, the crude partial
+imitation of a rooster was insufficient. They,
+the latter, commendably hurried into trousers<a name="page_219" id="page_219"></a>
+and pot hats, into satin trains and pink tulle
+and white kid gloves; but the transition was
+too hurried, too optimistic, and the resulting
+incongruity ... I was not a student of ethnology,
+I had no theory of races, but, gazing
+down from my box, it seemed to me that yesterday
+could not be instantly combined with to-day;
+it was evident that there was no short way
+by a long and painful business of evolution.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing more unfortunate could well be
+imagined; for, in the retributive manner I had
+already mentioned, the Africa buried in the
+West, so long forgotten, took life again, and
+the danger to everyone had been acute
+through a long period of Havana's years.
+We, in temperate zones, in weathers that had
+no need of the protection of a special dark pigment,
+had been lucky; but we were trying our
+luck very severely by subjecting it to the old
+potencies not yet entirely lost. The danzon
+was, actually, in a way beyond legislation, a
+masked ball in black and white, where the unmasking
+was involuntary and fateful.</p>
+
+<p>One, I thought, spoiled the other, like an<a name="page_220" id="page_220"></a>
+incomplete experiment in chemistry where
+nothing but an opaque liquid and an intolerable
+stench was evolved. Perhaps, with
+acute necessity, a successful clear result would
+reward the future with peace; but it wouldn't
+happen in my knowledge; I hadn't a thing in
+the world to do with it. What occurred to
+me then was the useful fact that the present
+scene afforded the right, the only, ending for
+my story, The Bright Shawl. It would
+have to be tragic, but only indirectly; nothing,
+I had decided, should happen to my principal
+character beyond a young moment of supreme
+romance. No, the mishap, death, must envelop
+his friend, the patriotic Cuban. He'd
+be killed by a Spanish officer, through a
+woman&mdash;a woman in the bright shawl of the
+dancer that had been preserved as a memento
+of tender regard.</p>
+
+<p>Some arrangement was necessary, perhaps a
+prostitute. Well&mdash;I had seen her, in virginal
+white muslin, with the weight of her head, its
+oval flattened by the hand of China, her heavy
+hair, inclined on its slender neck: a figure, in<a name="page_221" id="page_221"></a>
+my pages, impassively fateful, remote as I had
+seen her seated in a gay company. That
+finished the story, for the youthful American,
+after a vain public effort to secure for himself
+the dignity of a heroic end, would be ignominiously
+deported from Cuba. I had been often
+asked how I arrived at my plots, but more
+often accused of never reaching an intelligible
+plan, and, until now, I'd been incapable of
+giving an explanation satisfactory even to myself;
+but here was one accounted for to a considerable
+degree. It had begun by an instinctive
+attachment to a city, to Havana; and the
+emotions brought into being had crystallized
+into a plan, for me, unusually concise.</p>
+
+<p>There was a temptation, to be avoided, to
+tell it in the first person; a version that had
+come to be disliked almost as universally as a
+set of letters. Some celebrated stories had
+been written that way&mdash;Youth&mdash;but I felt that
+it was an unnecessary charge on sympathy.
+While the creation of character was no longer
+the tyrant it had been, a certain air of veracity
+was most desirable, and the limited scope of a<a name="page_222" id="page_222"></a>
+single intelligence discussing, explaining, himself
+was too marked. The great trouble with
+the romantic novels up to the very present had
+been that there was never a doubt of the ultimate
+happiness of all who should be happy
+and the overwhelming misery of those who
+should be miserable. No peril was the father
+of a thrill, because from its inception it was
+plainly impotent to harm the lovely and the
+brave. The pleasure had from witnessing a
+dexterous job was lost in an artifice that seldom
+approached an art. But we'd improved that,
+an improvement expressed in the utter loss of
+the word hero; no man, or woman, was now
+entirely safe in the hands of his romantic author;
+the two manners had come creditably
+together.</p>
+
+<p>I had become, subconsciously, interested in
+a girl pausing on the floor, and, in response to
+my scrutiny, she glanced up with a shadowy
+smile. I gazed with instant celerity and fixedness
+at the ceiling, then at the upper boxes
+opposite, since below, indiscretion was laid like
+a trail of powder, of explosive rice powder.<a name="page_223" id="page_223"></a>
+There was no cutting in at that ball. She was
+more than charming, too, with her mixed
+blood evident in her carriage, her indolence,
+rather than in feature. She wore blue, a
+wisely simple dress that showed small feet,
+like butterflies in their lightness, and the instinctive
+note of a narrow black velvet band on
+her throat.</p>
+
+<p>An air of sadness rested on her, on, principally,
+a superiority anyone could see. Her
+fan opened and shut in a thin pointed hand.
+A maid, I told myself, reflecting the aristocracy
+of the closets of delicate clothes in her
+charge, scented from the gold-stoppered bottles
+of her mistress. She was another phase
+of what had been going on at such length
+through my mind&mdash;a different catastrophe,
+since she was denied the reward of the virtues
+in either of the races that had made her. In
+Boston she would have become a bluestocking,
+a poet singing in minor cadence to traditional
+abolitionists become dilettantes, but in
+Cuba, tormented by the strains of the danzon:<a name="page_224" id="page_224"></a></p>
+
+<p>There, her flax burning in resentment and
+despair, she might be extinguished in the tide
+restlessly sweeping to the troubled coast of
+Birrajos: or, at Havana, carried into the secrets
+of the Ñañigos: in the black cabildo of
+that society, provision was made for a woman.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>It was significant that the first organization
+of ñañiguismo in Cuba was purely African,
+for the hatred of its members, Carabalíes, for
+the white race made the admission of even
+mulattos impossible. This society&mdash;tierra or
+juego&mdash;was formed during the administration
+of General Tacón, in the village of Regla, and
+called Apapá Efí. It was, against the protests
+of its originators at sharing the secret
+with too many, enlarged, and spread through
+the outskirts of Havana. There the mulattos
+greatly outnumbered the blacks, and they
+formed a society of their own, its oath sworn
+in Ancha del Norte Street, named Ecobio Efó
+Macarará. They insisted on a common
+brotherhood and their right of entering the<a name="page_225" id="page_225"></a>
+fambás, the ceremonial rooms; but there was
+a determined opposition, open battle and murder
+in Perserverancia and Lagunas Streets.
+After this there was a general meeting at Marianao,
+the early bar to color, as distinguished
+from black, removed, and the infusion of the
+dark ritual of Efi into white blood began.
+When, ten years after, an indiscriminate society,
+the Ecobio Efó, was terminated by the
+authorities, Spanish nobles and professional
+men were assisting in the rites.</p>
+
+<p>What had started upon the African river
+Oldan as a tribal religion took on, in Havana,
+a debased version of Rome, and the veneration
+of Santa Barbara was added to the supreme
+worship of Ecue, a figure vaguely parallel to
+the Holy Ghost, created in the sounding of a
+sacred drum. And what, equally, in the Carabalíe
+Bricamó was Dibó, God, became in
+Cuba an organization of criminals and finally,
+when its more obvious aspects were stamped
+out, a corrupt political influence. There, in
+the clearest possible manner, was traced the
+eventual effect of so much heralded superiority,<a name="page_226" id="page_226"></a>
+such enormous advantages, on native belief.</p>
+
+<p>There could be no doubt, though, of the
+fact that, in any pretence of civilization, the
+ñañigos were detrimental; it was unavoidable
+that they should have degenerated into a savage
+menace, not only in overt acts, which were
+not lacking, but in practices of mental and
+emotional horror. Their ceremony, with its
+strange vocables and distortions of meaning;
+the obscene words that were but symbols for
+obscenities beyond imagination; the character
+of their dance, which gave them the name arrastrados,
+men who dragged themselves, reptilian,
+on the ground&mdash;all combined in a poison
+like a gas sweeping from the morass of the
+past. It held, beneath its refuge and defiance
+of society, the appeal of a portentous secret,
+bound in blood, the fascination, the fetishism,
+of orgiastic rituals, and, under that, stronger
+still, delirious barbarity.</p>
+
+<p>Its legend was not different from the others
+which formed the primitive bases of subsequent
+elaborate beliefs: the miracle, with an<a name="page_227" id="page_227"></a>
+attending baptism, was consummated by a
+woman, Sicanecua, who found a crying fish&mdash;the
+fish was a sacred Christian sign&mdash;in her
+jar of water. In recognition of this she was
+sacrificed and her blood put to a holy use, and
+the fish skinned for the drum, sounded by the
+fingers, used in his praise. Here Ecue, the divine,
+was baptized by Efó in the Oldan, who
+in turn signed his disciple. And about that
+tradition, guarded&mdash;with its instrument&mdash;in
+the altar, Ecue sese, the degenerate elements
+and characters of modern ñañíguismo gathered.
+There were, necessarily, changes in the
+Cuban form of worship&mdash;the skin of a goat
+was substituted for the unprocurable variety
+of fish, and the timbre of the original drum
+secured by an artifice. The need, as well, of
+finding another anointment than human blood,
+difficult to procure in Havana, led to the sacrifice
+of the rooster or a goat. This, now, had
+a crucifix, with the profession that God, Dibó,
+must be over everything, and a sacramental
+singing; but not the Te Deum or Laudes ...
+Efore sisí llamba, and the reply Ho Isueribó<a name="page_228" id="page_228"></a>
+éngomo ... Mocongo! while the Empegó,
+the clerk of the service, shifted brightly colored
+curtains and enveloping handkerchiefs
+and marked with yellow chalk the head and
+body and palms of the initiates.</p>
+
+<p>A diablito had in charge the offices of the
+catechism&mdash;Come with me; where did you
+leave your feet; where I left my head! Enter
+where Bongó is and cry with your brother!
+Look at your brother because they want to
+choke him. He conducted the sacrifice of the
+goat, which, in a memorial of Guinea, was
+eaten with pointed sticks, with the drink Mucuba,
+made from sugar-cane rum and bitter
+broom. A strange procession followed, led
+by the Insué, with a woman in a shift, Sicanecue,
+and the diablito skipping backward. The
+sese, a silver crucifix with four black feathers,
+was carried, and later the remains of the feast
+were thrown into a cemetery.</p>
+
+<p>The effort to end ñañiguismo in Havana began
+in eighteen hundred and seventy-five,
+when its gatherings were forbidden; but,
+deeply traditional, it flourished in hidden<a name="page_229" id="page_229"></a>
+places, in the jail where ñañigos were confined
+and the cellars of Jesús María. Long
+before that the poet Placido had been killed;
+within a few years the Llamba named Hand
+on the Ground was judicially executed; and
+following the assassinations during the carnival
+of eighteen hundred and sixty-five, sweeping
+deportations were enforced. In Maloja
+Street a juego, Acaniran Efó Primero, with
+officers drawn from reputable quarters, was
+surprised; the next year the Abacuá Efó was
+exterminated; a public clash of diablitos resulted
+in apprehensions; and twenty-five ñañigos
+were taken on Vista Hermosa Street.</p>
+
+<p>It was, in reality, Africa in Havana,
+brought against its wish and to its tragic misfortune;
+and, planted in an alien soil, but
+among a common genus, the mysteries of religion,
+it grew into an aberration of all that
+gave it birth. Aside from this, its significance,
+for me, lay in its amazing language, an idiom,
+specifically, composed of the Carabalíe Bricamó
+and a Spanish without articles or conjunctions,
+equally incapable of exact images<a name="page_230" id="page_230"></a>
+and the expression of abstract thought. But
+taking the place of its omissions, was a congealing
+power of suggestion, of creating,
+through, apparently, no more than the jumbling
+of common terms and sounds, sensations
+of abject dread. The four bishops of the ritual,
+in their order, were Insué, Illamba, Mocongo,
+Empegó. In ñañiguismo man was
+momban, an idiot was sansgueré, a knife icuá
+rebesine, a pistol etombre, immortality embigüí,
+the night erufie, war ochangana, the
+sun fansón, and worms cocorico. The language
+took short rigid forms, phrases; it had
+little if any plasticity: Amandido amanllurube,
+The day goes and the night comes. Efiquefi
+que buton efique Ename onton Ellego
+Efimeremo Iboito, Eurico sangacurici eurico
+sanga quimagua sanga ñampé, ñampé sanga
+mariba, The owl drinks the blood of the dead
+and flies to the sea.</p>
+
+<p>The terms of the acts of worship were particularly
+heavy, sultry, and held in their
+sound alone the oppressive significance of fetishes
+as black as the night from which they<a name="page_231" id="page_231"></a>
+were shaped. The minister of death to Sinanecua,
+a ceremony which became traditional,
+was named Cuañon-Araferrobré, and the act
+of sacrifice the Acuá Meropó. The singers
+before the altar, making visible the sacred
+stick, Bastón Mocongo, intoned Mocongo Machevere,
+Mosongo moto cumbaba eribo, and
+Erendio basi Bome, I believe in God and God
+is great; with, at the last, silencing the profession
+of faith, the voice of the drum, tarinibongó.</p>
+
+<p>The ñañigos had been driven from the
+streets through which, at first, on King's Day,
+Dia Reyes, they were permitted, once a year,
+to parade with native costumes and instruments&mdash;atables
+and marugas and ecous, a flattened
+bell struck by a thin stick. Their fambás
+were destroyed and hysteria cooled; but I
+wondered about both the secretiveness and
+the persistence of the primitive spirit and the
+delicate melancholy that veiled the girl so
+faintly tinged with carabalíe, resting below
+my box through the rasping strains of the danzon.
+Had her gain been greater than the loss,<a name="page_232" id="page_232"></a>
+the ruin, of her simplicity; had she, dragged
+abruptly from saurian shadows, been made
+white by an arbitrary papal sun?</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>A glimmering dawn, faintly salt with the
+presence of the sea, was evident in the Parque
+Central when I walked the short distance, not
+more than a few steps, from the opera house
+to the Inglaterra, my head filled with the resonant
+bos and bongos of ñañiguismo. Havana,
+for a moment, seemed like a cemetery&mdash;its
+own marble cemetery of Colon&mdash;where a
+black spirit, buried in a secret grave, walked
+and would not be still. I speculated about
+that same spirit in another connection&mdash;in its
+influence on painting and music, on Western
+literature. It had affected dancing profoundly,
+making it, in the United States, almost
+wholly its own; and the Spanish, with
+whom, in the richness of a tradition and perfect
+expression, no others could compete,
+owed a great debt to Africa. Our music, too,
+it had influenced to such a degree that it was<a name="page_233" id="page_233"></a>
+doubtful if we had any outside the beat of
+negro strains.</p>
+
+<p>Stephen Foster, a great composer in that he
+had enclosed the whole sentiment of an age
+within his medium, was often but a paraphrase
+of a darker melody. Foster, like Havana,
+was Victorian, a period that dreamed of marble
+halls, set in a pitch impossible now, and
+yet, curiously, charged for an unsympathetic
+world with significant beauty. This negro
+contribution was in a melancholy and minor
+key, the invariable tone of all primitive song;
+in poetry, as well, a lyrical poetry nearly approaching
+music, there was an analogous coloring
+between the race and its shadowed measures.</p>
+
+<p>The reminiscent emotions that, with us,
+were mainly personal, in the negro were
+tribal; he had not been individualized,
+brought to a separate consciousness; and, in
+consequence, his song, practically lacking in
+intellect, dealt only with instinctive feelings.
+Growing shrill with passion and sinking to
+the monotonous laments of formless sorrow, it<a name="page_234" id="page_234"></a>
+belonged equally to all the men, the women,
+who heard it&mdash;it was their voice and comprehensible
+triumph or pain; without artifice it
+wasn't artificial nor ever insincere; and, as a
+means of gold, a medium for lies, it had no
+existence. The voice of all, an instrument of
+natural beauty, shared by villages, its pure
+quality, brought in slave ships that rotted with
+their dead on the sea, gave the shallow and
+vitiated West a fresh earthen tonic chord.</p>
+
+<p>The negro, naturally, hadn't grown more
+cheerful in his new imposed setting; and it
+was possible that his music had gained an
+added depth, at any rate for our perception,
+from the weight of banishment and shackles.
+He had not turned with any success to creative
+accomplishment that needed mental independence
+and courage, or to forms, like the
+novel, wholly modern. On the other side, the
+novel, with all its trumpeted young freedom,
+had never, with even relative truth, expressed
+the negro in the Americas. This, a subject of
+appalling splendor, had, in the United States,
+been turned over to the comic spirit and short<a name="page_235" id="page_235"></a>
+impressions&mdash;stories, superficially, falsely, pathetic.
+The fact was that we had enormously
+harmed the negro, and for that reason, in the
+familiar process of human self-esteem, nationally
+we were uneasy, resentful in his presence.
+We saw him, when we escaped from
+absolute hatred, as a figure, a subject, without
+dignity: we lacked there the penetrative sympathy
+which was the soul of imaginative fiction.
+Such a novel, I thought, was perhaps
+of everything that offered the best worth writing.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly nothing more difficult could be
+well attempted; my knowledge, in Havana
+and through the ñañigos, had been perceptibly
+enlarged, and I was not unfamiliar with the
+state in which, I decided, the story must be laid&mdash;not
+in Virginia, but upon a level grey reach
+of Louisiana, cut by tideless bayous and saturated
+with the fever of cane and cypress
+brakes. A bitter novel like the broom herb
+put in the ceremonial drink Mucuba, pages
+from which it would be hard to exclude a fury
+of hopelessness! And what an angry disturbed<a name="page_236" id="page_236"></a>
+wasplike hum it would provoke! No
+magazine, of course, would touch it&mdash;it would
+be sold, for a week or ten days, from under
+counters, and then we, my novel and myself,
+metaphorically burned. A magnificent project:</p>
+
+<p>A huddle of cabins at the edge of a wall of
+black pines beyond a deep ruined field&mdash;but
+perhaps this was South Carolina&mdash;infinitesimal
+ragged patches of corn, a sandy trail lost
+abruptly in the close forest, and half-naked
+portentous shapes. There would be a town
+back in the country with a desolate red square
+of great sprawling water-oaks smothered in
+hanging moss, a place at once old and raw,
+and ugly with vindictive ignorance.... The
+negroes were infinitely happier in Havana,
+where the heat, the palms, were their own; and
+I was surprised that they didn't desert the
+United States in a body for a suaver spirit in
+the air and man. Cuba, to a large measure,
+with what final result I wasn't concerned, had
+absorbed them in the manner that Spain had
+absorbed the Moors. Havana made some denial<a name="page_237" id="page_237"></a>
+of this, and prided itself, with entire justice
+where it was true, on unmixed Castilian
+blood; but the other was perceptible in the
+gait, the very whiteness, of Cuba's principal
+city&mdash;the whitest walls on earth. This didn't
+bother me; I liked Havana from its farthest
+view to its most intimate façade, and I was
+grateful to whatever had made it.</p>
+
+<p>In my room the negro, with the danzon,
+faded from my mind; and I only paused to
+speculate dimly about his overwhelming preference,
+where a choice existed, for the Protestant
+religions instead of Roman Catholicism.
+I should have thought that the color, the
+imagery and incense, of the Catholic Church
+would be irresistible. Yet there were, in the
+United States, thousands of colored Methodists
+and Baptists for one adherent of Rome.
+It might be that the hymns of Methodism, sufficiently
+melancholy and barbarous in figure,
+God knew, were the reason&mdash;the character of
+the hymns and congregational singing, the
+loud pictorial shouts. The later religion of
+the negroes, in addition to what I had already<a name="page_238" id="page_238"></a>
+considered, was a subject to be avoided; but
+running through my mind was the memory
+that in Richmond, not long ago, it was common
+in the evenings of spring for bands of
+negroes to go through the streets singing spirituals
+and constantly gathering others who
+dropped their work, their responsibilities, to
+join the passing chorus of hope.</p>
+
+<p>That was lost now, I understood, a vanished
+custom, killed by self-consciousness; but it
+would have been a fine thing to hear approaching
+and receding through the dusk, a
+stirring resinous volume or a mere vibrant
+echo, a dying whisper. Perhaps that, a dying
+whisper, would be the solving of the whole
+tragic difficulty&mdash;disease and winter and relentless
+natural laws. The latter moved with
+great deliberation through unlimited centuries,
+but the impatience of men demanded instant
+release from trouble. They wanted
+black black and white white, with no transition,
+no blurring of the edges; this was their
+dream, but they constantly defeated it, betrayed
+their ideal. Yes, it might be that<a name="page_239" id="page_239"></a>
+the humility of that defeat, in the far
+future, would accomplish a universally
+white city. Only one other way offered:
+a different humanity from any which
+had yet appeared outside rare individuals
+... but that vision seemed, to me, as fantastic
+as the sentence in Carabalíe Bricamó that
+gave it expression, Eruco en llenison comunbairán
+abasí otete alleri pongó&mdash;We of this
+world are all together. The truth was, honestly
+at heart, that I couldn't commit myself
+to all, or even a quarter, of what this would
+have demanded. Impersonally I was able to
+see that, as an idea, it was superb, I realized
+that something of it must inform my pages;
+but it was useless to pretend that I could begin
+to carry it out or that I was, in practice,
+a Christian. I was tired, and my thoughts
+grew confused, but dimly in my mind was
+again the consciousness of the remote fate of
+the creative writer, an individual without even
+the desire to be a part of that for which he
+cried.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_240" id="page_240"></a></p>
+
+<p>Certainly I had no marked love of humanity
+the following morning, caught with a small
+mob in a narrow passage of the wharf where
+I was waiting to board the steamer for Key
+West. I was between the water and a wooden
+partition, the heat was savage, and a number
+of youthful marines, returning home from
+Camagüey, were indulging in a characteristic
+humor&mdash;the dealing of unsuspected blows,
+of jarring force, among themselves. They
+shoved each other, in a crowd shoulder to
+shoulder, disregarding entirely the indirect
+results of their vigor, and exchanged threats
+of fulminating violence. They were not more
+annoying than the others, but only more evident;
+and, as the advertised time of departure
+was past by an hour, and then a second hour,
+and the sun found its way into our walled
+space, even the marines subsided. Every trace
+of dignity, in that heat, ran away from the
+people about me. While, on the whole, they
+were uncomplaining, even relatively considerate
+of others' discomforts, wondering, with
+weary smiles, when the boat would be off, I<a name="page_241" id="page_241"></a>
+had no such kindly promptings.... I hated
+them all, the ugliness of the women and the
+men's dull or merely sharp faces, with an intensity
+that wasn't normal. When I was very
+young indeed, scarcely past two, I had been
+nearly crushed in a throng after the Sesquicentennial
+parade in Philadelphia; long afterward
+I had been, to all practical purposes,
+asphyxiated in a train that broke down
+in an Apennine tunnel; as a result, I had an
+unreasoning fear of crowded bodies or limited
+space; and this dread, before long, on the Havana
+wharf, turned into an acute aversion for
+every individual and thing about me.</p>
+
+<p>The surrounding insistent good nature developed
+in flashes of exchanged homely wit,
+varied by the attitudes of restraint, and, of
+them both, I couldn't tell which I resented
+more. The present position of the waiting
+people, the long exposure to the intolerable
+sun, was the result of their patience; of that
+and their personal inefficiency reflected in
+their official management. All the bad governments
+in the world, the dishonesty and universal<a name="page_242" id="page_242"></a>
+muddles, were nothing more than monuments
+to the immeasurable stupidity and
+greed of the people; they were betrayed politically
+not by powerful and unscrupulous parties
+and men, but by themselves; perpetually
+and always by their own laziness and superstition
+and jealousy.</p>
+
+<p>The Cubeños, the original inhabitants of
+Cuba, were parcelled in the bondage of encomiendas,
+exterminated by the passion of the
+Spanish Crown for gold; when they had
+been sacrificed, Africa was raked by slavers
+for labor in the mines and planting;
+beneath every movement, instigated by hope
+or supported by returns, riches were the incentive
+and power. Men had never, within history
+and their secret hearts, cared for anything
+else: an ineradicable desire. There was a
+facile public gabble about the qualities of the
+spirit, about soul; but the solid fact of
+money, both as an abstraction and what conspicuously
+it brought, was what the people
+worshipped, wanted, what they schemed or<a name="page_243" id="page_243"></a>
+stole for, or in the service of which they performed
+the most heroic toil.</p>
+
+<p>This was not, necessarily, an ignoble or negligible
+pursuit, but it was 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 preëminently 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 Malecón;
+individually, money was counted by the
+million&mdash;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.<a name="page_244" id="page_244"></a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_245" id="page_245"></a>
+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&mdash;the
+aroma of the cigars, the coolness of the
+Telegrafo Café 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 Larrañaga 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<a name="page_246" id="page_246"></a>
+limes, and without them a Daiquiri was
+robbed of its inimitable flavor.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the habit of lies and self-delusion
+had become a fundamental part of
+society&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;to write into paper and ink
+some permanence of beauty. For that, Chester<a name="page_247" id="page_247"></a>
+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&mdash;the
+confidence, at last, of success&mdash;with which I
+wanted to take it up again.</p>
+
+<p class="ast">*&nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; *</p>
+
+<p>When I turned, looking back, Cuba had<a name="page_248" id="page_248"></a>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_249" id="page_249"></a>
+and Schouten and Roggeveen, had a solid bartering
+sound compared with Francesco de
+Cordoba and Miruelo and Angel de Villafañe.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Havana was, perhaps, a Saragossa of souls,
+with the acts and thoughts of its early vivid
+years, of Careñas, 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<a name="page_250" id="page_250"></a>
+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&mdash;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 ñañigos&mdash;was equally possible
+against a background at once fantastic
+and restrained.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_251" id="page_251"></a>
+be long dominant either as a city or in its men;
+it had ruled an island but not the world, it
+had never been&mdash;in that latitude&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_252" id="page_252"></a>
+yellow cannon. The curtain fell to rise again
+on Don Miguel Tacón!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;not, of a kind, absent&mdash;could
+be safely ignored. Further than that,
+ignoring them was, for any measure of pleasure,
+absolutely needful: the pedantic spirit in
+Havana was fatal.</p>
+
+<p>What, almost entirely, I had been told to
+view, expected to enjoy, I had avoided; yet not<a name="page_253" id="page_253"></a>
+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&mdash;as though I were rich instead of extravagant&mdash;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&mdash;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,<a name="page_254" id="page_254"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I was, for a moment, depressed at the definite
+leaving behind of Havana&mdash;for the tranquil
+passage had seemed only an extension of
+its spirit&mdash;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&mdash;a responsibility, impossible<a name="page_255" id="page_255"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/back.jpg" width="359" height="550" alt="image of the book&#39;s back cover" title="image of the book&#39;s back cover" />
+</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="transcriber note"
+style="border:2px dotted gray;margin:5% auto 5% auto;padding:2%;">
+<tr><th align="center">No normalization or correction has been made in the spelling of Spanish contained in the book;<br />
+The following typographical errors were corrected by the etext transcriber:</th></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">beginninng of the Prado=>beginning of the Prado</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">like a harsh native wine, from Balbao=>like a harsh native wine, from Bilbao</td></tr>
+</table>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's San Cristóbal de la Habana, by Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA HABANA ***
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's San Cristobal de la Habana, by Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: San Cristobal de la Habana
+
+Author: Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+Release Date: December 30, 2011 [EBook #38445]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAN CRISTOBAL DE LA HABANA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: image of the book's cover]
+
+
+
+SAN CRISTOBAL
+DE LA HABANA
+
+_THE WORKS OF
+JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER_
+
+_NOVELS_
+
+THE LAY ANTHONY [1914]
+MOUNTAIN BLOOD [1915]
+THE THREE BLACK PENNYS [1917]
+JAVA HEAD [1918]
+LINDA CONDON [1919]
+
+SHORTER STORIES
+
+GOLD AND IRON [1918]
+THE HAPPY END [1919]
+
+TRAVEL
+
+SAN CRISTOBAL DE LA HABANA
+
+_Published in New York by
+ALFRED A. KNOPF
+and for sale at all bookshops_
+
+
+
+
+SAN CRISTOBAL DE LA HABANA
+
+BY
+
+JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
+
+    "_Many yeeres since I had knowledge by
+    relation of that great and golden Citie
+    which the Spaniards call El Dorado._"
+
+    _Sir Walter Ralegh_
+
+[Illustration: colophon]
+
+NEW YORK
+
+ALFRED A KNOPF
+
+1920
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
+ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+        _To
+
+     H. J. B. BAIRD
+
+          An
+        Havana
+    which he is free
+to decline in every particular
+       save the
+     dedication_
+
+
+
+
+SAN CRISTOBAL DE LA HABANA
+
+
+There are certain cities, strange to the first view, nearer the heart
+than home. But it might be better to acknowledge that, perhaps, the word
+home has a wider and deeper significance than any mere geographical and
+family setting. Many men are alien in houses built from the traditions
+of their blood; the most inaccessible and obdurate parts of the earth
+have always been restlessly sought by individuals driven not so much by
+exterior pressure as by a strange necessity to inhabit a barren copper
+mountain, a fever coast, or follow to the end of life a river lost in a
+savage remoteness, hiding the secret of their unquenchable longing.
+
+Not this, precisely, happened to me, approaching Havana in the early
+morning, nothing so tyrannical and absolute; yet, watching the silver
+greenness of Cuba rising from the blue sea, I had a premonition that
+what I saw was of peculiar importance to me. I grew at once impatient
+and sharply intent on the resolving of a nebulous, and verdant mass into
+the details of dense slopes, slopes that showed, from the sea to their
+crowns, no break in a dark foliage. The sombreness of the leaves
+immediately marked the land from an accustomed region of bright
+maples--they were at once dark, glossy, and heavy, an effect I had often
+tried to describe, and their presence in such utter expanses filled me
+with pleasure. It was exactly as though the smooth lustrous hills before
+me had been created out of an old mysterious desire to realize them in
+words.
+
+Undoubtedly their effect belonged to the sea, the sky, and the hour in
+which they were set. The plane of the sea, ruffled by a wind like a
+willful and contrarily exerted force, was so blue that its color was
+lost in the dark intensity of tone; while the veils of space were
+dissolved in arcs of expanding light. The island seemed unusually solid
+and isolated, as complete within itself as a flower in air, and
+saturated with romance. That was my immediate feeling about Cuba, taking
+on depth across water profounder than indigo ... it was latent with the
+emotional distinction which so signally stirred me to write.
+
+At once, in imagination, I saw the ineffable bay of Guatanago, where
+buccaneers careened their ships and, in a town of pink stucco and
+windows with projecting wooden grilles, drank and took for figureheads
+the sacred images of churches painted blue. On the shore, under a canopy
+of silk, a woman, naked but for a twist of bishop's purple, bound her
+hair in gold cloth. From where she stood, in dyed shadow, a figure only
+less golden than the cloth, she heard the hollow ring of the caulking
+malls and the harsh rustle of the palms. Drawing rapidly nearer to what
+was evidently the entrance to the harbor of Havana I considered the
+possibilities of such a story, such a character:
+
+She had her existence in the seventeenth century, when Morgan marched
+inland to rape Camagueey--the daughter, without doubt, of a captain of
+the Armada de Barlevento, the Windward Fleet, and a native woman taken
+in violence; a shameless wench with primitive feelings enormously
+complicated by the heritage of Spain's civilization, a murderous,
+sullen, passionate jade, wholly treacherous and instinct with ferine
+curiosity. The master for her, I decided, must come from the Court of
+Charles, the London of the Cavalier Parliament, a gentleman in a gay
+foppery masking a steel eaten by a cruelty like a secret poison. It
+would be a story bright with the flames of hell and violent as a
+hurricane; the pages would reflect the glare of the sand scrawled with
+cocoanut palms, and banked with mangroves; and, at the end, the bishop's
+purple would be a cerecloth and the gallows chains sound in Xaymaca.
+But, above everything else, it would be modern in psychology and color
+treatment, written with that realism for which the only excuse was to
+provide a more exact verisimilitude for romance.
+
+The Cuban shore was now so close, Havana so imminent, that I lost my
+story in a new interest. I could see low against the water a line of
+white buildings, at that distance purely classic in implication. Then it
+was that I had my first premonition about the city toward which I was
+smoothly progressing--I was to find in it the classic spirit not of
+Greece but of a late period; it was the replica of those imagined cities
+painted and engraved in a wealth of marble cornices and set directly
+against the tranquil sea. There was already perceptible about it the air
+of unreality that marked the strand which saw the Embarkation for
+Cytherea.
+
+Nothing could have made me happier than this realization; an extension
+of the impression of a haunting dream turned into solid fact. The
+buildings multiplied to the sight, bathed in a glamorous radiance; and,
+suddenly, on the other hand, rose Morro Castle. That structure, small
+and compact and remarkably like its numerous pictures, gave me a
+distinct feeling of disappointment. Its importance was historic rather
+than visible, and needed, for appreciation, a different mind from mine.
+But the narrowness of the harbor entrance, a deep thrust of blue
+extending crookedly into the land, the sense of crowded shipping and
+massed city, the steamers of the world and broad shaded avenues at my
+elbow, impressed me at once with Havana's unique personality.
+
+Nothing, however, was more ingratiating than the long coraline limestone
+wall of the Cabanas on its sere abrupt hill at the left; ponderous and
+stained brilliantly pink by time, it formed a miraculous complement to
+the pseudo-classic whiteness below. A sea-wall built into a wide
+promenade followed the shore, there was a circular pavilion on a flagged
+plaza piled with iron chairs, the docks were interspersed with small
+public gardens under royal palms, and everywhere the high windows had
+ornamental balconies empty in the morning sun. I heard, then, the voice
+of Havana, a remarkably active staccato voice, never, I was to learn,
+sinking to quiet, but changing at night into a different yet no less
+disturbing clamor.
+
+What I tried to discover, rushed through broad avenues and streets
+hardly more than passageways, was the special characteristic of a city
+which had already possessed me. And, ignorant of the instantaneous
+process that formed the words, I told myself that it was a mid-Victorian
+Pompeii. This was a modification of my first impression, a truer
+approximation, for it expressed the totality of marble facades
+inadmissible architecturally, yet together holding a surprising and
+pleasant unity. No one, I thought excitedly, had ever rightly
+appreciated Havana; it required a very involved understanding, a feeling
+not entirely admirable. No, it wasn't Hellenic, not what might be called
+in the first manner; it hadn't the simplicity of great spirit, a true
+epoch; Havana was artificial, exotic: Spain touched everywhere by the
+tropics, the tropics--without a tradition--built into a semblance of the
+baroque.
+
+It was rococo, and I liked it; an admission, I believe, laying me open
+to certain charges; for the rococo was universally damned; the Victorian
+period had been equally condemned ... and I liked it. Why, God knew!
+Ornament without use, without reference to its surface and purpose,
+invited contempt. A woman in a hoop skirt was an absurdity; black walnut
+furniture carved and gilded beyond recognition, nonsense. Yet they had
+my warm attachment. Havana claimed me for its own--a city where I could
+sit at tables in the open and gaze at parterres of flowers and palms and
+statues and fountains, where, in the evening, a band played the light
+arias of La Belle Helene.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To illustrate further the perversity of my impulses: I was so entirely
+captivated by the Hotel Inglaterra that, for the rest of the day, I was
+indifferent to whatever might be waiting outside. The deep entrance with
+its reflected planes of subdued light and servants in cool linen; the
+patio with water, its white arches on iridescent tiles; the dining-room
+laid in marble, panelled with the arms of Pontius Pilate, the bronze
+lustre of the tiling and the long windows on the Parque exactly as I had
+anticipated, together created the happy effect of a bizarre domain. The
+corridor on which my room opened was still more entrancing, its arches
+filled with green latticework, and an octagonal space set with chairs
+and long-bladed plants.
+
+Yet the room itself, perhaps one of the most remarkable rooms in the
+world, easily surpassed what, until then, I had seen. There were slatted
+door screens, cream-colored with a sapphire-blue glass knob, topped in
+an elaborate Gothic scrolling; and the door beyond, inconceivably tall,
+opened on an interior that seemed to reach upward without any limit. It
+had, of course, a ceiling, heavily beamed in dark wood; and when, later,
+I speculated carefully on its height, I reached the conclusion that it
+was twenty-five feet above the grey-flowered tiling of the floor. The
+walls were bare, white; about their base was laid a line of green glazed
+tiles; and this, except for the glass above the French window, was the
+only positive note.
+
+The window, too, towered with the dignity of an impressive entrance;
+there were two sets of shutters, the inner elaborately slatted; and over
+it was a semi-circular fanlight of intensely brilliant colors--carmine
+and orange and plum-purple, cobalt and yellow. It was extraordinarily
+vivid, like heaped gorgeous fruit: throughout the day it dominated the
+closed elusive interior; and not only from its place on high, for the
+sun, moving across that exposure, cast its exact replica on the floor,
+over the frigidity of the austere iron bed, down one wall and up
+another.
+
+It was fascinating merely to sit and watch that chromatic splash, the
+violent color, shift with the afternoon, to surrender the mind to its
+suggestions.... They, as well, were singularly bright and illogical.
+Such glass, such colors, had been discarded from present decorative
+schemes; but I recalled hints of them in the houses of eighteen seventy;
+I seemed to remember them in pagoda-like conservatories, and at once a
+memory of my childhood returned. Not that there were, actually, such
+windows at Woodnest, sombre under the tulip-poplars; yet the impression
+of one re-created the feeling of the other, it brought back disturbingly
+a vanished time with its figures long dead.
+
+Havana was identified as an authentic part of my inheritance. I was--in
+a purely inner manner--to understand it, to have for it the affectionate
+recognition, the sense of familiarity, of which I have already spoken.
+The city was wholly expressed by the fanlight sparkling with the
+shifting radiance of the blazing day. It was possible, without leaving
+the room, to grasp the essential spirit of a place so largely unseen.
+Then it occurred to me that, indeed, I had seen Havana, and that the
+wisest thing to do was to leave at once, to go back with my strong
+feeling uncontaminated by trivial facts; but a more commonplace impulse,
+a limiting materialism, pointed out that, since I had come away for a
+change of scene, I had best realize a semblance of my intention. Still
+those colors, like a bouquet of translucent tulips, easily outweighed in
+importance all that I subsequently gained; they gave the emotional
+pitch, the intellectual note, of whatever followed--a mood, an entire
+existence, into which I walked with the turning of a sapphire-blue knob.
+
+For the rest the furniture was scant--a walnut bureau with a long
+mirror, necessary chairs, and an adequate bathroom like a shaft with
+shining silver faucets at its bottom. From outside, even through the
+heat of noon, the sustained activity of sound floated up through the
+shutters--the incomplete blending of harsh traffic alarms and blurred
+cries announcing newspapers.
+
+It was later when I went out on my balcony: across the narrow depth of
+San Rafael Street the ornamented bulk of the Gallego Club--the Club and
+the opera house in one--opposed a corner against the sweep of the Parque
+Central; and to the right, between the glitter of shop windows, poured
+an unbroken procession of motors. A great pillar of the paseo below was
+hung with gaily covered magazines; a bootblack, wrinkled and active,
+with a single chair on a high stand, was cleaning a row of white shoes,
+obviously from the hotel; and the newsboys were calling La Politica
+Comica in a long-drawn minor inflection.
+
+The sun, that I had seen rising on the undiscovered hills of Cuba, was
+sinking behind the apprehended city; it touched the caryatids of the
+Gallego Club and enveloped, in a diminished gold like a fine suffusion
+of precious dust, the circular avenue, the royal palms, the flambeau
+trees and Indian laurels, of the plaza. The whiteness of the buildings,
+practically unbroken, everywhere took on the tone of every moment: now
+they were faintly aureate, as though they had been lightly touched by a
+gilder's brush; the diffused shadows were violet. The shadows slowly
+thickened and merged; they seemed to swell upward from the streets, the
+Parque; and the buildings, in turn, became lavender, and then, again, a
+glimmering white. Only the lifted green of the palms was changeless,
+positive, until it was lost in darkness.
+
+A great many people appeared below, moving with an air of determination
+on definite ways. The faces of the men were darkened by the contrast of
+their linen; I couldn't see their features; but what struck me at once
+was the fact that there were, practically, no women along the streets.
+It was a tide of men. This, at first, gave me an impression of monotony,
+of stupidity--women were an absolute essential to the variety of any
+spectacle; and here, except for an occasional family group hurrying to a
+cafe, a rare stolid shape, they were utterly lacking.
+
+The reason, however, quickly followed the observed truth; this was, in
+spirit, Spain, and Spain was saturated with Morocco, a land where women,
+even the poorest, were never publicly exhibited. Havana was a city of
+balconies, of barred windows, of houses impenetrable, blank, to the
+streets, but open on the garden rooms of patios. And suddenly--while the
+moment before I had been impatient at the bareness resulting from their
+absence--I was overwhelmingly conscious of the pervading influence of
+charming women. Here they were infinitely more appealing than in places
+where they were set out in the rows of a market, sometimes like flowers,
+but more often resembling turnips and squashes. Here, with extreme
+flattery, women were regarded as dangerous, as always desirable, and
+capable of folly.
+
+It was a society where a camellia caught in the hair, a brilliant glance
+across a powdered cheek, lace drawn over a vivid mouth, were not for
+nothing. In the world from which I had come these gestures, beauties,
+existed; but they were general, and meaningless, rather than
+special--the expression of a conventional vanity without warmth. There
+was an agreement that any one might look, the intensest gaze was
+invited, with the understanding that almost none should desire; and a
+cloak of hypocrisy had been the result; either that or the beauty was
+mechanical, the gesture furtive and hard.
+
+For Havana a woman was, in principle, a flower with delicate petals
+easily scattered, a perfume not to be rudely, indiscriminately, spent; a
+rose, it was the implication, had its moment, its perfection of eager
+flushed loveliness, during which what man would not reach out his hand?
+After that ... but the seed pods were carefully, jealously, tended. And
+here, in addition to so much else, was another shared attitude drawing
+me toward Havana--an enormous preference for women who had the courage
+of their emotions over those completely circumspect except in situations
+morally and financially solid.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My dressing for dinner I delayed luxuriously, smoking the last Dimitrino
+cigarette found in a pocket, and leaving the wet prints of my feet on
+the polished tiles of the floor. I was glad that I had brought a trunk,
+variously filled, in place of merely a bag, as I might have done; for it
+was evident that Havana required many changes of clothes. It was a city
+which to enjoy demanded a meticulous attention to trifles. For one thing
+it was going to be hot, April was well advanced; and the glorietas, the
+brightly illuminated open cafes, the thronged Prado and operatic
+Malecon, the general air of tropical expensiveness, insisted on the
+ornamental fitness of its idlers.
+
+I debated comfortably the security of a dinner coat, slightly varied,
+perhaps, by white flannels; but in the end decided in favor of a more
+informal jacket of Chinese silk with the flannels. A shirt, the socks
+and scarf, were objects of separate importance; but when they were
+combined there was a prevailing shade of green.... I had no inclination
+to apologize for lingering over these details, but it might be necessary
+to warn the seekers after noble truisms that I had no part in their
+righteous purpose. Even noble truths, in their popular definitions, had
+never been a part of my concern: at the beginning I was hopelessly
+removed from them, and what was an instinct had become, in an experience
+of life not without supporting evidence, the firmest possible attitude.
+A tone of candor, if my reflections were to have the slightest interest
+or value, was my first necessity; and candor compelled me to admit that
+I thought seriously about the jacket which finally slipped smoothly over
+my shoulders.
+
+It was an undeniable fact that I was newly in a land of enormous
+interest, which, just then, held the most significant and valuable crop
+growing on earth. But that didn't detain my imagination for a moment.
+The Havana that delighted me, into which I found myself so happily
+projected, was a city of promenading and posted theatre programmes, of
+dinners and drinks and fragrant cigars. I was aware that from such
+things I might, in the end, profit; but I'd get nothing, nothing in the
+world, from stereotyped sentiments and places and solemn gabbled
+information.
+
+On top of this I had a fixed belief in the actual importance of, say, a
+necktie--for myself of course; I was not referring to the neckties of
+the novelists with a mission, lost in the dilemma of elevating mankind.
+A black string, or none at all, served their superiority. But for the
+light-minded the claim of a Bombay foulard against the solider shade of
+an Irish poplin was a delicate question; for the light-minded the choice
+of one word in preference to another--entirely beneath the plane of a
+mission--was a business for blood, an overt act. And with me there was a
+correspondence between the two, a personal exterior as nicely selected
+as possible and the mental attitude capable of exquisite choice in
+diction. But this was no more than a development of all that I first
+admitted, a repetition of my pleasure at being in Havana, a place where
+the election of a cocktail was invested with gravity. And, carefully
+finished except for the flower I'd get below, I was entirely in harmony
+with the envelopment, the adventure, to which my persistent good luck
+had brought me.
+
+The elevator going down was burdened with expensive women, their bodies
+delicately evident under clinging fragile materials, their powdered
+throats hung with the clotted iridescence of pearls; the cage was filled
+with soft breathing and faint provocative perfumes--the special lure of
+flowers which nature had denied to them as women. It was, I told myself,
+all very reprehensible and delightful:
+
+Here were creatures, anatomically planned for the sole end of maternity,
+who had wilfully, wisely I felt, elevated the mere preliminary of their
+purpose to the position of its whole consummation. More intoxicated by
+sheer charm than by the bearing of children, resentful of the thickened
+ankles of their immemorial duty, they proclaimed by every enhanced and
+seductive curve that their intention was magnetic rather than economic.
+They were, however, women of my own land, secure in that convention
+which permitted them exposure with immunity, and here; in Havana, they
+failed to interest me; their voices, too, were sharp, irritable; and
+even in the contracted space of the elevator their elaborate backs were
+so brutally turned on the men with them--men correct enough except for
+their studs--the hard feminine tyranny of the chivalrous United States
+was so starkly upheld, that I escaped with a sigh of relief into a
+totally different atmosphere.
+
+The lower hall, the patio and dining-room on the left, were brilliant
+with life, the wing-like flutter of fans; and it would be necessary, I
+saw, to have my cocktail in the patio; but before that, following a
+purely instinctive course, I walked out to the paseo in front of the
+hotel. The white buildings beyond the dark foliage of the Parque were
+coruscant with electric signs, and, their utilitarian purpose masked in
+an unfamiliar language, they shared with the alabaster of the facades,
+the high fronds of the royal palms and the monument to Marti, in the
+tropical, the classic, romanticism.
+
+Hardly had I appeared, gazing down the illuminated arcade, when a man
+approached me with a flat wide basket of flowers. There were,
+inevitably, roses, tea roses as pale as the yellow of champagne,
+gardenias, so smooth and white that they seemed unreal, heavy with
+odor; those I had expected, but what surprised me were some sprigs of
+orange blossom with an indefinite sweetness that was yet perceptible
+above the thicker scents. I chose the latter immediately, and the flower
+vendor, wholly comprehensive of my mood, placed the boutonniere in my
+jacket. The moment, now, had arrived for a Daiquiri: seated near the
+cool drip of the fountain, where a slight stir of air seemed to ruffle
+the fringed mantone of a bronze dancing Andalusian girl, I lingered over
+the frigid mixture of Ron Bacardi, sugar, and a fresh vivid green lime.
+
+It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was to discover later at
+the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be
+sitting, at that hour in the Inglaterra, with such a drink. It elevated
+my contentment to an even higher pitch; and, with a detached amusement,
+I recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was formally in
+effect. Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent,
+for it held, in its shallow glass bowl slightly encrusted with
+undissolved sugar, the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it
+set the mind free of responsibility; obliterating both memory and
+to-morrow, it gave the heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and
+momentarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal, fears.
+
+Yes, that was the danger of skilfully prepared intoxicating drinks....
+The word intoxicating adequately expressed their power, their menace to
+orderly monotonous resignation. A word, I thought further, debased by
+moralists from its primary ecstatic content. Intoxication with Ron
+Bacardi, with May, with passion, was a state threatening to privilege,
+abhorrent to authority. And, since the dull were so fatally in the
+majority, they had succeeded in attaching a heavy penalty to whatever
+lay outside their lymphatic understanding. They had, as well, made the
+term gay an accusation before their Lord, confounding it with loose, so
+that now a gay girl--certainly the only girl worth a ribbon or the last
+devotion--was one bearing upon her graceful figure, for she was apt to
+be reprehensibly graceful, the censure of a society open to any charge
+other than that of gaiety in either of its meanings. A ridiculous, a
+tragic, conclusion, I told myself indifferently: but then, with a fresh
+Daiquiri and a sprig of orange blossoms in my buttonhole, it meant less
+than nothing. It grew cooler, and an augmented stir set in motion toward
+the dining-room, where the files of damask-spread tables held polished
+silver water-bottles and sugar in crystal jars with spouts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wisdom of the attention I had given to my appearance was at once
+evident in the table to which the head waiter conducted me. Small and
+reserved with a canted chair, it was directly at one of the long windows
+on the Parque Central. This, at first sight, on the part of its arbiter,
+would not have been merely an affair for money--he had his eye on the
+effect of the dining-room as a whole, as an expanse of the utmost
+decorative correctness, and there were a number of men with quite
+pretty women, a great asset publicly, who had been given places in the
+center of the room. Yes, where I was seated the ruffled curtains were
+swayed by the night breeze almost against my chair, a brilliant section
+of the plaza was directly at my shoulder, and I was pervaded by the
+essential feeling of having the best possible situation.
+
+This was not, perhaps, true of characters more admirable than mine: but
+if I had been seated behind one of the pillars, buried in an obscure
+angle, my spirits would have suffered a sharp decline. I should have
+thought, temporarily, less of Havana, of myself, and of the world. The
+passionate interest in living, the sense of aesthetic security, that
+resulted in my turning continually to the inconceivable slavery of
+writing, would have been absent. But seated in one of the most desirable
+spots in existence, a dining-room of copper glazed tiles open on the
+tropics, about to begin a dinner with shrimps in the pink--the veritable
+rose--of perfection, while a head waiter, a triumph of intelligent
+sympathy, conferred with me on the delicate subject of wines, I felt
+equal to prose of matchless loveliness.
+
+The dinner, finally, as good dinners were apt to be, was small, simple,
+with--the result of a prolonged consideration--a bottle of Marquis de
+Riscal. All the while the kaleidoscope of the Parque was revolving in
+patterns of bright yellows, silver, and indigo. Passersby were
+remarkably graphic and near: a short man with a severe expression and a
+thick grey beard suddenly appeared in the open window and demanded that
+I buy a whole lottery ticket; a sallow individual from without unfolded
+a bright glazed sheaf of unspeakably stupid American magazines; farther
+off, the crowd eddied through the lanes between the innumerable chairs
+drawn up companionably on the plaza. At a table close by, a family of
+Cubans were supplementing the courses of formal dining with an endless
+vivacious chatter, a warmth of interest charming to follow.
+
+The father, stout, with an impressive moustache of which not one hair
+seemed uncounted or mislaid, regarded his short fat wife, his tall slim
+son, and his two entrancing daughters with an impartially active and
+affectionate attention. The girls were young, one perhaps fifteen and
+the other not more than a year or so older, though they both managed
+lorgnons with an ease and impertinent frankness that an older woman
+might well have envied, while they talked in rushes of vivid Spanish
+with an emphases of delectable shrugged shoulders, and, recognizing an
+acquaintance, exhibited smiles as dazzling as only youth knew. The boy,
+however, engaged me more strongly; a tone darker than the others, in
+repose his face, delicate in feature, was grave, reflective; his smooth
+black hair grew into a peak on his brow, his gaze was considerate,
+direct, and his mouth sensitive. Cuba, I thought, at its best; and here
+that was very good indeed. Any such degree of mingled dignity and the
+highly impressionable, of reserve and flexibility, was absent from the
+cruder young of the north.
+
+He had, at the same time, an indefinable air of melancholy, a bearing
+that, while not devoid of pride, belonged to a minor people, to an
+island the ultimate fate of which--in a political word of singular
+faithlessness--was hidden in shadow. An affair of mere simple courage,
+of execution for an ideal by Spanish rifles in a Cabanas foss, he would
+have borne with brilliant success; he'd have ornamented charmingly the
+security of a great coffee estate in Pinar del Rio; it was possible that
+he might be distinguished in finance; but there was not back of him the
+sense of sheer weight, of ponderous land, that gave, for example, the
+chance young Englishman his conscious security, the American his
+slightly shrill material confidence.
+
+This Cuban's particular quality, it seemed to me, belonged to the past,
+to an age when men wore jewelled buckles and aristocracy was an
+advantage rather than a misfortune. He had about him the graceful
+fatality now so bitterly attacked by the widening power of what was
+heroically referred to as the people. He represented, from the crown of
+his lustrous hair to his narrow correct dancing shoes, in his shapely
+hands and dark fine skin, privilege and sequestered gold. Outrages, I
+had heard, soon to be forever overthrown! It was possible that both the
+charges and the threatened remedy were actualities, and that privilege
+would disappear ... from one hand to another, and great lawns be cut up
+into cabbage patches and Empire ball-rooms converted into communal halls
+for village rancor.
+
+Not much, in the way of benefit, could follow that. And women in
+starched linen collars, with starched theories of civic consciousness,
+would hardly be an improvement on fragrant memories of satin, moments of
+passion and frailty, and the beauty of tenderness. A maze of clipped
+box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority,
+for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and
+their destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was
+immeasurably disastrous. All of this I saw reflected in the boy with
+peaked hair at the next table. He took a cigarette from a black silk
+case, and I was immediately reminded of my cigar.
+
+It had been chosen with immense care in the Inglaterra cafe for bonbons
+and souvenirs, liqueurs and cigars. How remarkable it was, I had
+thought, hovering above the case, which contained a bewildering choice
+of shapes and colors, to be in a land where all the cigars were, in the
+sense I knew, imported. I hesitated for a minute or more between a
+Larranaga and a banquet Corona, and finally decided on the former. It
+was as long as the cigar called Fancy Tales, but slightly thicker and
+rolled to a point at either end; and the first breath of its smoke,
+drifting in a blue cloud away from the window, told me that until then I
+had known but little of tobacco. Coffee so black that it stained the
+white shell of its cup; a diminutive glass of Grand Marnier, the
+distilled last saturation of oranges and fin champagne; and the
+Larranaga, the color of oak leaves freshly brown, combined in a
+transcending magic of contentment.
+
+The point was--my special inhibition as a traveler--that I didn't want
+to move; I had no wish to speak to anyone or see what, particularly, I
+should have hurried away to view. That impatience I had served when I
+was twenty-one, in Naples; a city uniquely planned for morbid and
+natural curiosity. There the animated frescoes of Pompeii had been
+posed, at two lire a figure, before my assumption of mature experience.
+But now, past forty, I was without the ambition and desire to follow the
+cabs of the American business men who, in the company of patient and
+fatigued Cubans, were, in the interest of vague appointments, bidding
+their families elaborate good evenings.
+
+Later it was inevitable that I should get to the theatres, hear whatever
+music offered, and see all the dancing, Spanish and Cuban, in the city
+of Havana, but not to-night. My present pleasure was not to be wasted in
+the bother of movement and a probable mistake. The cigar continued to
+veil me in its reflective smoke for another half hour, there was more
+coffee in the pot. The tempered heat of the day lay over me like a
+spell, like an armor against the chill, the gaunt winds and rain, of the
+north. The scent of the sprig of orange blossoms was just perceptible,
+at once faint and laden with the potency of a magical grove.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The weather, the temperature and special atmospheric envelopment of
+Havana, was, I was certain, different from any other, its heat modified
+by the winds that moved across the island at night, at least from this
+shore, and the days flooded with an incandescent sunlight like burning
+magnesium. Stirring slowly about my room before breakfast, the slatted
+shutters bowed against the already blazing day, a thread of cigarette
+smoke climbing hopelessly toward the far ceiling, I thought of the
+idiotic popular conviction that the weather was a topic for stupid
+minds. The reverse, certainly, was true, since, inbound with all the
+settings of life, all nature, the weather offered an illimitable range
+of suggestion.
+
+It had been the great discovery of imaginative prose--the novel for
+which we care most had been largely the result of that gained
+appreciation; and its absence in older books, placed in a vacuum,
+entirely accounted for their dry unreality. What, for instance, were the
+novels of Thomas Hardy but splendid records of the countryside weather,
+for nature and weather were one. This, more than any other force,
+conditioned men, stamping them out with an ice age, burning them black
+in Africa ... setting royal palms by the doors of the Hotel Inglaterra
+and willows along my lower lawn.
+
+The difference between Havana and West Chester was exactly that
+difference in their foliage, in the low April green of one and the harsh
+high fronds of the other. The quality, the weather, that made the trees
+made equally the men, just as it dictated their lives, the houses they
+lived in, their industries and planted grains. This was true not only
+of the country but of the city, too, of George Moore as well as Hardy;
+for though Moore belonged principally to salons and the discreet
+interiors of broughams, a good half of the beauty of his pages was due
+to his response to the quality of spring against a smoke-blackened
+London wall, the laburnum blossoming in his Dublin garden.
+
+The slightest impression of Havana must be founded on a sensitive
+recognition of the crystal light and printed shadows which, in addition
+to its architecture of fact, brought another of sweeping illusion. In
+the morning the plazas glittered in a complete revelation of every hard
+carving and leaf and painted kiosk, but later the detail merged in airy
+diagonal structures of shade. Modified, infrequently, by the gorgeous
+cumulous clouds drifting from the upward thrust, the anchorage, of the
+Andes, the entire process of the hours was upset. This was not simply a
+variation of inanimate surface, it had an exact counterpart in the
+emotions: bowed by an insuperable blaze or upright in the veiled sun,
+the attitude of harmony was profoundly affected. The night was
+altogether separate, a time, I gathered, when it seldom rained; and
+there was never another city that took advantage of the night like
+Havana. Released from the resplendent tyranny of the sun, everyone, it
+appeared, disdaining sleep, lingered in the plazas, the cafes, and along
+the sea-walls, until dawn threatened. Here the dark was not alone a
+stage for nocturnal plans and figures: it was without strangeness or
+fear for the Cubans thronging abroad, on foot and in motors, early and
+late. The whiteness of the buildings, too, even where they were not
+illuminated, defined spaces never obscure; the city was never wholly
+lost, obliterated by the imponderable blackness of the north. All this,
+every aspect of Havana's being, was the gift--the dangerous gift--of its
+situation, its weather. The blinding day, the city folded in a sparkling
+night, like a vision in blanched satin with fireflies in her hair, were
+nothing more than meteorological.
+
+For myself, my entire attitude was different in the room I now inhabited
+from the inherent feeling, in New York, of the Algonquin. I was, in
+white flannels and brown Holland, with roses against the mirror of the
+bureau, another man; not only my mentality but my physical bearing was
+changed. Here I was an individual who, moving about for an hour or so in
+the morning, spent the day until late afternoon in some quiet and cool
+inner spaciousness. That, I appreciated at once, was one of the
+comfortable peculiarities of Havana: it was always possible to be
+cool--in a cafe with the marble floor sprinkled with water; at the
+entrance of the Inglaterra, where, however, the chairs were the most
+uncomfortable in the world; or, better yet, with a book, a naranjada,
+and pajamas, transiently at home.
+
+For the iced refrescos of Cuba I had been prepared; and at breakfast,
+though that, I found later, was not its hour, I chose, rather than a
+naranjada, a pina colado--a glass, nearly as large and quite as thin as
+possible, of the chilled essence of pineapple. A remarkable, a
+delightful, concoction. Later I heard the refrescos referred to
+contemptuously by Americans whose attitude toward the Cubans paralleled
+their opinion of the local drinks. They elected whiskey, at times
+condescending to gin, and the effect was portentous. Some sat near me
+now, with breakfasts of bubbling ham and crisped eggs, lamenting the
+coffee.
+
+It was doubtless part of the hypnotism of my liking for Havana that
+reconciled me to the coffee, poured simultaneously with hot salted milk
+into the cup. I accepted it at once, together with a cut French roll
+ingeniously buttered. Other efforts were made, through a window, to sell
+a wallpaper of lottery tickets; the vendor of magazines now put forward
+the Havana Post, printed in English; the curtains hung motionless, a
+transparent film on the bright space beyond.
+
+There was nothing I had to do, or see, no duty to myself to fulfill;
+and, watching the stir of tourist departure, I was thankful for my
+total lack of uncomfortable incentive. I had, for instance, no intention
+of ascending the height of Morro Castle, which--I had hardly needed the
+assurance--included a fatiguing number of stairs; nor of becoming
+familiar with Cabanas fortress. It had been quite enough to see in
+passing that long pink wall and know that there were old batteries of
+cannon embossed with the sovereign names of Spain. There were no picture
+galleries; and in Havana the churches were rich in neither tradition nor
+beauty, and the convents of early days had been turned into warehouses.
+It was, on the whole, a city without obtrusive history; even its first
+site was on the other side of the island; the wall, except for a
+fragment or two, had gone; its early aspects were practically absorbed
+by the later spirit that had captivated me. Here, if ever, was a place
+in which honesty of mood could be completely indulged.
+
+A state not innocent of danger to the Puritan tradition--lately
+assaulted with useless vigor--of suppression; for to the Latin
+acceptance of the whole of life had been added the passions of the
+tropics. Cuba had cynically realized this, and multiplied a natural
+frankness with a specialized attention to the northern masculinity I had
+seen leaving the hotel at odd hours last night. I felt even so soon,
+with prohibition a reality, that our national prudery was a very
+unfortunate influence indeed in Havana. The season was at an end--only a
+few days of the racing remained--so I had missed the obvious worst; but
+traces of the corruption of the dull, the dull themselves in diminishing
+numbers, lingered.
+
+Havana, in common with other foreign countries, and with so many golden
+reasons to the contrary, had no general liking for Americans. The few
+who had understood Cuba, either living there or journeying with
+discretion, were most warmly appreciated; and, characteristically, it
+was they more than the natives who were principally disconcerted by the
+released waggishness of Maine and Ohio and Illinois. But the majority
+were merely exploited. There was, certainly, something on the other side
+of the fence, for the Cubans were morbidly sensitive about their land,
+their monuments and martyrs, not necessarily impressive to the
+Anglo-Saxon heritage and temperament. There were fundamental racial
+differences, with a preponderant ultimate weight in favor of continents
+as opposed to islands. The fascination Havana had for me wasn't
+inevitable; I was only considering with regret, aesthetic rather than
+moral, the effect on Cuba of any prostitution.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As, in a temporary stoppage of its circular traffic, I walked across the
+Parque Central, its limits seemed to extend indefinitely, as if it had
+become a Sahara of pavement exposed to the white core of the sun; and I
+passed with a feeling of immense relief into the shade of a book-shop at
+the head of Obispo Street, where the intolerable glare slowly faded from
+my vision as I fingered the heaps of volumes paper-bound in a variegated
+brightness of color and design. In any book-shop I was entirely at home,
+contented; and here specially I was prepossessed with the idea of
+buying a great number of the novels solely for their covers--in short,
+making a collection of Spanish pictorial bindings. But the novels, I
+discovered, were, even in paper, almost a peso each; and since I was
+reluctant to invest two hundred or more dollars in a mere beginning, the
+idea vanished. Their imaginative quality, however, the drawing and color
+printing, were excellent, far better than ours; in fact, we owned
+nothing at all like them.
+
+They had a freedom of cruelty, a brutality of statement, of truth,
+absent in American sentimentality: where women were without clothes they
+were naked, anatomically accounted for, as were the men; and the
+symbolical representations of labor and injustice were instinct with
+blood and anguish. A surprising number of stories by Blasco Ibanez were
+evident; and it struck me that if I had read him in those casual bright
+copies, without the ponderous weight of his American volumes and
+uncritical reputation, I might have found a degree of enjoyment. There
+were a great many magazines, mostly Spanish, gayly covered but with the
+stupidest contents imaginable--the bad reproductions of contemporary
+photographs on vile grey paper; although one, La Esefa, admirably
+reproduced, in vivid color and titles, the Iberian spirit of the lighter
+Goya.
+
+Though I had been on narrow streets before, I had never seen one with
+the dramatic quality of Obispo. Hands might almost have touched across
+its paved way, and the sidewalks, no more than amplified curbs, hardly
+allowed for the width of a skirt. It was cooled by shadow, except for a
+narrow brilliant strip, and the open shops were like caverns. The
+windows were particularly notable, for they held the wealth, the choice,
+of what was offered within: diamonds and Panama hats, tortoise shell,
+Canary Island embroidery, and perfumery. There were cafes that
+specialized in minute cakes of chocolate and citron and almond paste set
+out in rows of surprisingly delicate workmanship, and shallow cafes
+whose shelves were banked with cordials and rons, gin, whiskies, and
+wine. There were bottles of eccentric shape holding divinely colored
+liqueurs, squat bottles and pinched, files of amber sauternes, miniature
+glass bears from Russia filled with Kuemmel, yellow and green chartreuse,
+syrupy green and white menthes, the Cinziano vermouth of Italy, Spanish
+cider, and orderly companies of mineral waters.
+
+These stores had little zinc-topped bars, and there were always groups
+of men sipping and conversing in their rapid intent manner. The street
+was crowded and, invariably allowing the women the wall, it was
+necessary to step again and again from the sidewalk. They were mostly
+Americans: the Cuban women abroad were in glittering automobiles,
+already elaborate in lace and jewels and dipping hats, and drenched in
+powder. They were, occasionally, when young, extremely beautiful, with a
+dark haughtiness that I had always found irresistible.
+
+In my early impressionable years it had continually been my fate to be
+entranced by lovely disagreeable girls with cloudy black hair and skin
+stained with brown rather than pink. Imperious girls with elevated chins
+and straight sensitive noses! They had never, by any chance, paid the
+slightest attention to me; and the Cubans passing by with an air of
+supreme disdain called back my old interest and my old desire. I felt,
+for the moment, very young again and capable of romantic folly, of
+following a particular beauty to where her motor--a De Dion
+landaulet--disappeared into a courtyard with the closing of the great
+iron-bound doors.
+
+A marked, not to say sensational, transformation of my own person had
+been a conspicuous part of that young imaginary business; for, though I
+was fat and clumsy, I managed to see myself tall and engaging, and dark,
+too; or, anyhow, a figure to beguile a charming girl. Something of that
+hopeless process had taken place in me once more, now the vainer for the
+fact that even my youth had gone. The quality which called back a past
+illusion was very positive in Havana, and my feeling for the city was
+greatly enriched, further defined. It was charged with hazard for what
+men like me had dreamed, leaving the actuality for the pretended; the
+pretended, that so easily became the false, was, in Havana, real.
+
+The Obispo under its striped awnings, with its merchandise of coral and
+high combs and pineapple cloths; the women magnetic with a Spain that
+had slept with the East, the South; the bright blank walls, lemon
+yellow, blue, rose; the palms borne against the sky on trunks like
+dulled pewter; the palpable sense of withdrawn dark mystery, all created
+an atmosphere of a too potent seductiveness. The street ended in the
+Plaza de Armas, with the ultramarine sea beyond; and as I sat, facing
+the arched low buff facade of the President's Palace, my brain was
+filled with vivid fragments of emotion.
+
+What suddenly I realized about Havana, the particular triumph of its
+miraculous vitality, was that it had never, like so much of Italy,
+degenerated into a museum of the past, it was not in any aspect
+mortuary. Its relics of the conquistadores were swept over by the flood
+of to-day. Yet I began to be vaguely conscious of the history of Cuba,
+of that Cuba from which Cortez had set sail, in the winter of fifteen
+hundred and nineteen, for Mexico. Later this would, perhaps, become
+clearer to me; not pedantically, but because the spirit of that early
+time was still alive. I made no effort to direct my mind into deep
+channels. What must come must come; and if it were a gin rickey rather
+than the slavery of the repartimento system, I'd be little enough
+disturbed.
+
+The gin rickey proved to be an immediate reality, in the patio of the
+Inglaterra--a stream of silver bubbles shot into a glass where an
+emerald lime floated vivaciously. I had no intention of going out again
+until the shadows of the late afternoon had lengthened far toward the
+white front of the Gomez-Mena building across the plaza; and after lunch
+I went up to the quiet of my room. I should, certainly, write no
+letters, read--idly--none of the few books published about Cuba, which
+were on my table; and I began the essays of James Huneker called
+Bedouins. His rhapsodies over Mary Garden, as colorful in style as the
+glass above the window, I soon dropped and picked indifferently among
+the novels that remained. A poor lot--the thin current stream of
+American fiction, doubly pale in Havana.
+
+The day wheeled from south to west. I was perfectly contented to linger
+doing nothing, scarcely thinking, in the subdued and darkened heat.
+There was a heavy passage of trunks through the echoing hall without,
+the melancholy calling of the evening papers rose on the air; I was
+enveloped in the isolation of a strange tongue. To sit as still as
+possible, as receptive as possible, to stroll aimlessly, watch
+indiscriminately, was the secret of conduct in my situation. Nothing
+could be planned or provided for. The thing was to get enjoyment from
+what I did and saw; what benefit I should receive, I knew from long
+experience, would be largely subconscious. I had been in Havana scarcely
+more than a day, and already I had collected a hundred impressions and
+measureless pleasure. How wise I had been to come ... extravagantly,
+with--as it were--a flower in my coat, a gesture of protest, of
+indifference, to all that the world now emphasized.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+However, the tranquillity of the afternoon was sharply interrupted by my
+going, unexpectedly, to the races at Oriental Park. I had to dress with
+the utmost rapidity, leaving the choice of a tie to chance, for the dun
+car of the United States Military Attache was waiting for me. The
+Attache, handsomely bearing the brown seal of Philippine campaigns,
+abstracted in manner, sat forward with an imperturbable military
+chauffeur, while the back of the car was flooded by the affable speech
+of a Castilian marquis whose variety of experience in the realms of
+expert and dangerous games had been limited only by their known forms.
+It was unquestionably the mixture of my commonplace Presbyterian blood
+and incurable habit of romance that gave me a distinct satisfaction in
+my surroundings. I was glad that the Marquis was what he was and that
+he held a trans-continental motor record; it pleased my honest
+democratic instincts when other cars were held back for our progress;
+and, finally, the deep chairs on the veranda of the Jockey Club were
+precisely right for a lounging afternoon in an expensive sporting
+atmosphere.
+
+The race track seemed to me long--was it a mile?--and, with the horses
+at a starting post across from the grandstand, I couldn't tell one from
+another. The grandstand was on the right, and beyond the park were low
+monotonous lines of stables. It had been raining, the track was heavy,
+and the race that followed the blowing of a bugle covered the silk of
+the jockeys with mud. My pleasure, as always, slowly subsided at the
+persistent intrusion of an inner destructive questioning. Incontestably
+the racing, the horses lining fretfully and scrambling through the muddy
+pools, left me cold. The sweep of the Jockey Club, too, was
+comparatively empty of interest; the spectators there, though they were
+more or less intent upon the results posted on the board opposite, were
+not the immemorial onlookers at such affairs of sweepstakes, selling
+plates and furloughs.
+
+The Cuban women present, elaborately dressed for shaded lawns and salons
+de the, were largely foreign to the wide-spread open spectacle. I
+remembered English races where groups of dukes with ruddy features, in
+rough tweeds, sat through drizzling afternoons on their iron-shod seat
+ricks, and women of title, in waterproofs and harsh brogues, tramped
+through the sloshing turf ... an attitude far removed from Havana. A
+group of royal palms, lifted in the middle distance, alone gave the
+races an exotic air; though they were, of course, promoted and ridden by
+Americans, and their mechanics were quite those which operated in New
+Orleans and Butte and Baltimore. Now I was annoyed because I had,
+thoughtlessly, come; I might as well have gone to the baseball game in
+what had formerly been the bull ring.
+
+Yet I could retire to my speculations for escape, and I thought how
+peculiarly modern outdoor games, sport, belong to the British--to them
+and their relatives beyond the sea. I remembered, in this connection,
+the story of a French vicomte I knew, a man of imposing build, who, in
+yellow gloves, shot field larks attracted by the flashing of a mirror
+manipulated by his valet. Le sport! But the Spaniards, bred to the
+delicate agility of bull fighting, trained in endurance on the
+inconceivably fast pelota courts, were more athletic than the French;
+though, as a race, they were inclined to delegate their games to
+professionals. The sporting amateur, in spite of the Marquis, was a
+rarity; rather they chose to be lookers-on at brilliant diversions which
+retained an appreciable amount of a mediaeval cruelty diversified from
+our own brutal strain.
+
+This, naturally, had been influenced, strengthened, in Cuba by the
+climate, the breath of the tropics; even the winters were not conducive
+to violent exercise, aside from the fact that that was the prerogative
+of stolid temperaments. It was the deliberate, the unexcitable, who
+most excelled at trials of personal muscular skill; and neither of them
+were at home below certain latitudes. For myself, I was grateful, for I
+hadn't much in common with the exemplifications of field skill I had
+met. They were very apt to pay for their success by the absence of the
+attributes I particularly admired; often they were snobs of a very
+exasperating type--monuments of college beef with irreproachable hair,
+sacrosanct pins, and insensate conventional mentalities.
+
+A race at an end, the jockeys, carrying their saddles, trooped to the
+judges' stand to be weighed, and I was shocked by their wizened,
+preternaturally cunning faces. They were like pygmies of a strange breed
+in red and yellow and blue satins; faultless for their purpose, on the
+ground they were extraordinary, leather-skinned, with puckering eyes,
+drawn mouths, and distorted bodies. They wrangled among themselves in
+shrill or foggy voices--a very depressing specialization of humanity.
+But the horses were magnificent, slender and shining. I admired them
+from a distance, glad that it was no part of my responsibility to ride.
+Long ago, under the pressure of an untender emotion, I had learned to
+sit on a horse through his reasonable moments; but I had never become at
+ease, and I stopped riding when, on the country road of a May Sunday
+noon, a tall sorrel ran away with me so fast and so far that we passed
+three churches with their scattering congregations.
+
+There were, on the veranda, drinks, and even they--the Scotch
+highballs--translated into Spanish, had an unfamiliar and borrowed
+sound. It was on my return, stopping at the Telegrafo Cafe, that I
+learned the delightful possibility of a Daiquiri cocktail. It was twice
+as large as ordinary, what in the north was called a double; but no
+Daiquiri out of Cuba could be thought of in comparison. Only one other
+drink might be considered--a Ramos gin-fizz. My extreme allegiance had
+been given to the latter. I was not willing, even in the Telegrafo, to
+depose it from first place; but the Telegrafo was a pleasanter spot
+than the New Orleans Stag bar. I could see the beginning of the Prado,
+with the swirl of cars on their afternoon round to the Malecon. Some
+arc-lights, just turned on, were sources of color, like great
+symmetrical lemons, rather than of illumination. After another rain the
+bare flambeau trees would burst into fiery bloom.
+
+I was alone, and, sauntering back to the Inglaterra, through the gallery
+that had once been the Paseo Isabel, I came on my flower man, who
+advanced with a smile and a close nosegay of gardenias. A curious
+flower, I thought, getting water for them in a glass. They didn't wilt,
+as was usual, but turned brown and faded in the manner of a lovely
+pallid woman--a simile I had used in Linda Condon. A flower that
+belonged less to nature than to drawing-rooms, to rococo salons and the
+opera loges of eighteen forty, and not at all to the present in the
+United States. But worn low on the neck, it was entirely appropriate to
+the black hair of the Cuban woman. Gold hair, the fair temperament, had
+no business with gardenias: bouquets of white sweet peas looped with
+pale green and silver ribbon, yes; and dark bunches of moss roses; the
+old bouquets of concentric rings of buds in lace paper! They were the
+property of the girls I had known, the frank girls with clear grey eyes
+and the appealing girls with eyes like forget-me-nots. Something more
+poignant, a heavier disturbing perfume, was necessary against a figure
+seen only from a balcony or with a vague fleetness behind a grille
+gracefully wrought out of iron.
+
+My shutters now were opened, and I could make out, against the dimming
+sky, the languid folds of the Spanish flag above the entrance of the
+Centro Gallego--the standard that had conquered the western tropics,
+only, in turn, to be subdued by a freedom of the wind mightier than His
+Most Catholic Majesty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was some question of where I'd go for dinner, for in Havana there
+were many cafes to explore--the Dos Hermanos, the Paris, the Florida,
+the Hotel de Luz, the Miramar; but, finally, I walked down to the Prado,
+to the sea and the Miramar, a little because of its situation, directly
+on the Malecon, but principally for the reason that it had one of the
+most beautiful names possible, a name which called up the image of a
+level tide so smooth that it held in shining replica the forts, the
+ships, and the clouds. Tables were prepared for dinner in the
+restaurant, while those on the terrace were without cloths; but there I
+determined to sit, and the waiter whose attention I captured, after a
+long delay, agreed.
+
+A solitary couple had their heads together by the window, and they, with
+myself, were the only diners. It was, evidently, not now the place to go
+to at this hour. Beyond the dining-room, a patio, or rather an open
+court, was set for dancing, melancholy as such spaces can be, deserted
+and half-lighted; but I saw that a considerable activity was expected
+much later.
+
+I was glad that the terrace was empty, for, with the light now faded
+from the sea and its blueness merging into black, the remote
+tranquillity of evening was happier without a sharp chatter of voices.
+The Miramar, considering its place--the most advantageous in all
+Havana--and fame was surprisingly small: scarcely more than two stories
+high, the sombre maroon walls with their long windows hardly filled an
+angle of the Malecon. The dinner was slow in arriving, the silver made
+its appearance, a goblet was brought separately, a plate of French bread
+was later followed by its butter. The minute native oysters were no more
+than shreds adhering to their shells, but they had a notable flavor; a
+crawfish was at its brightest apogee; and an omelet browned in a
+delicate perfection of powdered sugar.
+
+I deserted Spanish wine, the admirable Riscal, for champagne; for there
+was about an air of departed charm, the whisper of old waltzes and
+tarleton, that demanded commemoration. The Miramar had been the gay
+center of that mid-century life which had folded Havana in the lasting
+influence of its memories. A gaiety not even at a disadvantage compared
+to the feverish society of to-day! The bodices then had been no more
+than scraps of chambery gauze and Chinese ribbon below shoulders to the
+whiteness of which the entire feminine age had been devoted. The
+flounced bell skirts had swung airily on gracious silk clappers.
+
+The automobiles on the Malecon multiplied, for the night was hot; soon
+there was a solid double opposed procession on the broad sweeping drive.
+This was a triumph of American engineering and, I had no doubt, an
+improvement on the informality of rocks and debris that had existed
+before. Yet I should liked to have seen it when the promenade had not
+yet been laid down with mechanical precision, in, perhaps, the early
+seventies. Then there were sea baths cut in the live rock at the end of
+the Paseo Isabel, at the Campos Eliseos, where the water was like a
+cooler liquid green air, and where, after storms, a foaming surf poured
+over the barriers. There were no motors then, but volantes and the
+modern quintrins, with two horses, one outside the shafts, and a riding
+calesero in vermilion and gold lace; and, latest of all, as new as
+possible, the victorias.
+
+Neither, then, was the Prado paved, but the trees were infinitely
+finer--five rows there were in fifty-seven--when the clamor of the city
+was, in great part, peals of bells. This was a familiar process with me,
+to leave the present for the past in a mood of irrational regret. But
+never for the heroic, the real past; the years I chose to imagine lay
+hardly behind the horizon; in Italy it had been the Risorgimento, at
+farthest the villeggiatura of Antonio Longo or the viole d'amore of
+Cimarosa in churches. And now, drinking my champagne on the empty
+flagged terrace of the Miramar, facing, across the parade of
+automobiles, the blank curtain of the night, starred on the right by the
+lights of castellated forts, my mind vibrated with grace notes no longer
+heard outside the faint distilled sweetness of music boxes.
+
+As if in derision of this, a loud unexpected music rose from the
+bandstand in the Plaza, and I saw that a flood of people, seated or
+moving along the pavements and through the lanes of chairs, had
+gathered. Nothing, I thought, could have delighted me more; but my
+anticipation was soon smothered by the absurdity of the selections: they
+were not from Balfe nor Rossini, neither military nor the accented
+rhythm of Spain ... the opening number was Parsifal, blown into the
+profound night with a convention of brassy emphasis.
+
+At the total destruction of my pleasure I cursed the pretentious
+stupidity of the band-master and a great deal else of modern Cuba. I
+remembered particularly some regrets, locally expressed, that the
+Spanish domination was no more. Things, it was said, were better ordered
+then. But this was a position the vainness of which I couldn't join: it
+was no part of my disposition to combat, or even regret, the inevitable.
+My course--quite other--was to project myself into periods whose very
+loss formed most of their charm. Gone, they took on the tender memories
+of the dead, and were invested with the dignity, the beauty, of a warm
+fragility.
+
+Two girls were now seated at a table by the entrance, and, though they
+were alone for the moment, it was evident that they had no intention of
+remaining in that unprofitable state longer than necessary. Their fleet
+appraising glances rested on me and the silver bucket by my chair, and
+one permitted the shadow of a discreet smile to appear on her carmined
+lips. She was pretty, lightly dressed in a flowery summer stuff, but she
+was as gold in coloring as corn silk; an intrusion in Havana I seriously
+deplored. The other was dark, but she was, at the same time,
+disagreeable; something had annoyed her excessively, and I made no move.
+Such company was occasionally entertaining, in a superficial
+conversational sense; but, I was obliged to add, not often.
+
+I went over all the informal girls I could recall who had been worth the
+effort to cultivate them, either charming or wise or sensitive, and my
+bag, unlike Chopin's or what George Moore reported his, was
+discouragingly slim. They had been, but perhaps of necessity,
+materialists, valuers only of the expensively concrete; yes, the
+majority of such adventures had been sordid. It was due, without
+question, to certain deterrent qualities in my own personality; but even
+more, I was convinced, to the fact that, in America, girls, or at least
+those of my youth, regarded emotion as portentously synonymous with
+ruin. Emotion, for nice girls, was deprecated; their sense of modesty,
+of shame, was magnified at the expense of everything else. This,
+together with the tragic difference in the age of marriage in nature and
+in society, had condemned the United States to very low levels of
+feeling.
+
+Unfortunately I had been born into the most rigid of all societies--a
+prosperous and Presbyterian middle-class; an influence that succeeded in
+making religion hideous before I was fifteen, planting in me, too, the
+belief that man was, in his instinctive life, filthy. I outgrew the
+latter, but never the first; and now, looking back, I could recognize
+how that lauded creed had nearly damned me to a hell far surpassing in
+dreadfulness anything of its own bitter imagining. The cold metaphysical
+fog had saturated us all alike.... How dreary my early experience was
+... what detestable travesties of passion! A carful of young men soon
+stopped at the curb of the Miramar, and the two girls, dark and gold,
+were immediately invested with the politest attentions. There was a
+chorus of laughter and protests and suggestions, in which a privileged
+waiter joined; and afterwards they vociferously left to dance at
+Carmelo.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Walking generally in the direction of my room, I left the Prado for an
+especially dramatic, no, melodramatic, street, where the bare walls and
+iron bolted doors were made startling by the white glare of electric
+lights. Fixed to the walls, infrequently, were the wrought-iron brackets
+of the earlier lanterns, converted, it might be, for the period before
+the present, into gas jets. In that watery illumination such streets
+must have seemed less amazing than now, and entirely natural with only
+the oil lanterns lifting a small surface of masonry or an isolated angle
+out of the night. Indeed, whole districts were dark, except for a rare
+lamp privately maintained as an obligation of grace. That darkness, like
+the streets, was mediaeval; they belonged one to the other--ways through
+which it was congruous to carry a flare and a sword, practical measures
+both.
+
+These precautions had been long discarded, but the passages themselves
+were unchanged, not a stone had shifted; they were, particularly at
+night, the Middle Ages. And it was as though a sudden blaze had been
+created by unholy magic; a sparkling and infernal radiance, throwing
+into intolerable clearness the decent reticence of the time. The arc
+lights gave the streets an absolute air of unreality and tragic
+strangeness. Moving in them, I had the feeling of blundering awake into
+a dream, of being irretrievably lost in an illusion of potential horror.
+An open door with its glimpse into an inner room only increased the
+oppression: it, too, was brilliant with electricity, a room of
+unrelieved icy pallor, except for a warmer blur under an Agony on the
+Cross, where a small company of men and women sat in a rigid blanched
+formality that might have been death.
+
+It was quite natural, a commonplace of Havana; but rather than a picture
+of familiar life, it resembled the memento mori of a grotto. My thoughts
+turned to the symbols and representations of the Catholic Church--a
+business of blood and torment and flame, of Sebastian torn with arrows
+and a canonized girl, whose name I forgot, carrying her eyeballs in a
+hand. Curiously enough, the spirit which had given birth to this
+suffering had been popularly lost, together with any conception of the
+ages in which it occurred; and all that remained was a pathological
+horror. Italy and Spain were saturated by it--Italy in the revolting wax
+spectacles of Easter, and Spain with the veritable crucifixions of
+to-day.
+
+It was, I supposed, to a certain extent unavoidable in an establishment
+whose hold on the ponderable present depended on threats and promises
+laid in the future. But it seemed to me unfortunate, to say the least,
+that a church whose business was life should be so concerned with smoky
+death. Threats and promises! The early history of Cuba, I remembered,
+was inbound with the administrative and protective powers of the Church:
+in fifteen hundred and sixteen the native Cubenos were put in the charge
+of the Order of Jeronimites, localized in La Espanola--Santo Domingo.
+The double motive of the Spanish Christian kings in the western
+hemisphere had been conversion and gold, but which of these was
+uppermost it was impossible to determine. However, when the gold, the
+temporal interest, decreased in one locality, the spiritual concern of
+Seville shifted to the more productive regions.
+
+That was a period, a conquest, when a violent death was a greater
+blessing than living in a state of damnable heresy; and so, between the
+saving of their souls and the loss of their bodies in the king's mines,
+the natives were thoroughly cared for. It must be said, though, that de
+las Casas, a priest whose spirit was above any intimidation or venality,
+denounced the outrages against the Cuban Indians to the shining heavens,
+the cerulean sea, the Audencia, and the Throne. But his humanitarianism
+was ineffectual against a system founded on the belief that a god had
+given the earth and its recalcitrant people for the profit and glory,
+the servants, of a single religious dogma.
+
+It was, possibly, a mental imperfection which gave impressions,
+emotions, such a great suggestibility. Returning toward the Inglaterra,
+I had no intention of losing myself in the mazes of applied theology;
+and I speedily dropped such a sombre topic from my thoughts. Turning
+back to the Prado, I found the walks filled with men, progressing slowly
+or seated on the flat marble benches along the sides. Whenever a woman
+did pass on foot, their interest and speculations were endless: heads
+turned in rows, sage remarks were exchanged, and tentative simpaticas
+murmured. Her mother--if she had the slightest pretensions to youth or
+good looks--was fervently blessed for so fetching a daughter. Here, of
+course, was the defect of the local attitude toward women--it put the
+emphasis perpetually on a gallantry affecting the men more even than the
+women. There was a constant danger of becoming one-sided.
+
+The Telegrafo and the Louvre were crowded, with more refrescos and ices
+on the table than authoritative drinks; the cigarettes of the discursive
+throngs in the Parque Central were like a sheet of fire-flies, and the
+Marti and Pairet theatres were spreading abroad the audiences of their
+second evening shows. The patio of the Inglaterra was well filled, and I
+stopped there; not, however, for a naranjada. Some late suppers were
+still occupying the dining-room, and a drunken American was gravely
+addressing a table and meeting with a mechanical politeness that I
+admired for its sustained patience. He left, finally, and wandered
+unsteadily, a subject of entertainment for his fellows and a mark of
+contempt to the Cubans present. Beyond me were some beautifully dressed
+English--two men in the final perfection of easy masculine garb and a
+girl, flushed with beauty, in pearls. On the other hand a young
+Frenchman, decorated with the most honorable of war ribbons, and two
+women, all in mourning, were conversing in the difficult Parisian idiom.
+
+I should have liked to be at either table--their attractions were equal;
+but, forced to remain alone, I thought of how rude the English would
+have been had I moved over to them. The English would have been boorish,
+and the French would have met me with an impenetrable polite reserve.
+Both would regard me as an idiot or an agent; to have spoken to them
+would have been an affront. And yet I was confident that we should have
+got on very well: I was not without a name in London, and the French
+were delightfully sensitive to any practising of the arts. The English,
+I gathered from their unguarded talk, were cruising on a yacht now lying
+in Havana harbor; and I saw myself, the following morning, going off to
+them in a smart tender and sitting under the white awning spread aft,
+with a whisky and soda, talking or not, but happily aware of the shining
+brass and mahogany fittings, the immaculate paint and gay pennants.
+
+I had always liked worldly pomp and settings, marble Georgian houses
+with the long windows open directly on closed greens and statues of
+lead; and to linger, before going down to dinner, on a minstrel's
+gallery above a stone hall and gathered company. I'd rather be on a
+yacht than on an excursion boat; yet I infinitely preferred reading
+about the latter. For some hidden or half perceived reason, yachts were
+not impressive in creative prose; there the concerns and pleasures of
+aristocracy frequently appeared tawdry and unimportant. Even its
+heroism, in the valor of battle and imperturbable sacrifice, was less
+moving to me than simpler affairs. Yet there was no doubt but that I was
+personally inclined to the extremes of luxury; and this apparent
+contradiction brought to my life, my writing, the problem of a devotion
+to words as disarmingly simple as the leaves of spring--as simple and as
+lovely in clear color--about the common experience of life and death,
+together with an absorbing attention for Manchu women and exotic
+children and emeralds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following day, hot and still, with the exception of capricious
+movements of air in paved shaded places, was overcast, the brilliancy of
+Havana, of the white and green plazas, subdued. And this softening of
+sharp lines and blazing facades seemed to influence, too, the noises,
+the calls, of the streets, so that it was all apparently insubstantial,
+like the ultimate romantic mirage of a city. I wandered along Neptuno
+Street to Belascoin, and then to the Parque Maceo, where I ignored the
+massed bronze and granite of its statue for the slightly undulating
+shimmering tide. In the distance the sea was lost in the sky--a nebulous
+gray expanse such as might have existed before the beginning of
+comparative solidity. I lost all sense of time, the centuries were
+jumbled together like mangos in a basket. Yes, they were no greater, no
+more important or stable, than tropical fruit.
+
+The vivid spectacle of Cuba, for example, contracted to a palm's
+breadth, the island became nothing more than the glimmer of a torch in
+illimitable dusk. It had been discovered by Columbus, a presumptuous
+term used arrogantly in the sense of created; an Arcadian shore where,
+because food grew without cultivation, without effort, and the gold was
+soft for beating into bracelets, the natives lived easily and
+ornamentally and in peace. They wore, rather than steel and the harsh
+shirts of the Inquisition, the feathers of birds with woven dyed quills
+and fragrant grasses. They sang, they danced with a notable grace, loved
+and died in the simplicity of bohios of palm board and thatch under nine
+Caciques.
+
+Then, in the drawing of a breath, they were all destroyed, gone, killed
+by slavery, in the name of God on the points of swords, by the
+rapacity, the corruption, the diseases, of civilization. A Spanish Cuba
+rose--Iberian and yet singularly different--a business of
+Captain-General and Teniente Rey, of alcalde and alcaide, of Santiago de
+Cuba and San Cristobal de la Habana. The French under Jacques Sores, and
+the English under Drake, sailed over the horizon. In less than a second,
+the expiration of a sigh, Diego de Velasquez and Narvaez, Isabel de
+Bobadilla, Rojas and Guzman, the merchant Diego Perez in vain laying the
+guns of the Magdalena in defense of the past, had gone. The Cedula from
+Madrid, in eighteen hundred and twenty-five, began the conspiracies,
+Tacon came and went, the fiscals beat free colored men to death and
+entertained the negro women naked at balls. The Lopez rebellion was
+followed by the ten years' war of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight and
+the peace of Zanjon, the great rebellion and Weyler.
+
+There remained now the indefinite sea and a city withdrawn, secretive,
+made vaguely beautiful by intangible voices, all its voices that had
+laughed and shouted, whispered and cried; and by the towers and walls
+merged in a single pattern, the old and the new drawn together by an
+aspect of impermanence, freed from the deceptive appearance of solidity.
+Suddenly its history had been shown to me in a flash of emotion, a mood
+of feeling. I hadn't come to Cuba ignorant of the land, but I had
+determined to slight what was but written inanimate fact. I had no
+disposition for instruction: books were powerless to create La Punta for
+me, it must bear its own credentials ... it might become, to my
+uncertain advantage, as important as a Daiquiri cocktail, as a Larranaga
+cigar, but hardly more.
+
+In any other case I should have cheated myself, not only of pleasure,
+the relaxation possible to honesty of mind, but of any hope of future
+material. The creative habit was the most tireless and frugal in
+existence: there was nothing--no experience, person, disillusionment, or
+pain--not endlessly sounded for its every note and meaning. No one could
+predict what would be indispensable, just as it was impossible to
+foresee, in the projection of a novel, where its fine moments occurred.
+And, returning to the descriptive and historical books on Cuba, left so
+largely unread at the Inglaterra, it was probable that they had omitted,
+in their effort for literal and conventional emphasis, what might in
+their subject be vivifying to me.
+
+This, however, was beyond spoiling--a history so picturesque, as I have
+intimated, that its very vividness, its commonest phases, had become the
+threadbare material of obvious romance. But, outside of all that, the
+other Havana, the mid-Victorian Pompeii, a city that none could have
+predicted or told me of, offered the incentive of its particular and
+rare charm. In the Parque Maceo, on the sea wall, my imagination stirred
+with the first beginnings of a story: it would take place in the period
+when the avaricious grip of Spain was loosening, a story of secret
+patriotism and the idealism of youth, set in marble salons, at the
+opera and the cafes. It would not concern itself with any love except
+the fidelity between two men, a story of friendship.
+
+There it would be different from The Arrow of Gold and Dona Rita; no
+peignoirs, thank you, but a formality, a passionate propriety, in
+keeping with the social gravity and impersonal devotion of the very
+young. There must be crinoline--would I never escape from that!--and
+candelabra with glittering prisms; Spanish soldiers in striped linen and
+officials with green-tasselled canes. My youth, he'd come from the
+United States, would have his little dinners at the Restaurant
+Francaise, in Cuba Street number seventy-two, and his refrescos at the
+Cafe Dominica. In the end he'd leave Havana, having accomplished nothing
+but the loss of his illusions for the gain of a memory like a dream, but
+his friend, a Cuban--I had seen him that first night at dinner in the
+Inglaterra--would be killed. How....
+
+It was time to go back to the hotel, and the story receded. I walked
+too far on Belascoin Street, all the way to Salud; and, past the Tacon
+Market, came out on the Parque de Colon, where now there was a hot dusty
+wind, like a localized sirocco, and I was glad to reach my room. The
+reflection of the colored glass above the window was hardly discernible
+on the tiles; the interior was permeated by a shadow which made the
+ceiling appear high beyond computation; and my wardrobe trunk, standing
+open, exhibited a rack of limp neckties. I turned again to the novels on
+the table and again let them drop, unattended, from a listless hand.
+Tepid water! And I wondered--a constant subject with me--when we should
+have a new vigorous American literature, a literature absolutely native,
+by men who had not, like myself, been to school to Turgenev and the
+English lyrical poetry. Henry James had found the United States lacking
+in background; the lack was evident, but not in the country of his
+birth.
+
+This was not a complaint against The Velvet Glove except as it equally
+applied to me; but an intense desire for a fresh talent, an ability to
+which we could, without reserve, take off our hats. The fact hit me that
+I was forty, although it was still the fashion among reviewers to speak
+of me as a promising young man, and that there were patches of grey hair
+on my temples. Yet I had been, everything considered, remarkably
+successful; there was no need for sentimental regret, a trait of mental
+feebleness.
+
+I decided to do something positive that evening, to go to the theatre,
+or, if it were playing, to see the Jai Alai. The latter was possible,
+and, by way of the Telegrafo, I reached the Hotel Florida for dinner; a
+restaurant which, because of the windows looking down on it, had the
+pleasant individual air of a courtyard. The music played, diners came
+and went, and I gazed up at the shallow balconies in the hopefulness of
+an incorrigible imagination. The Fronton Jai Alai--in Havana the game,
+pelota, had taken the title of its court--was a long way from Obispo
+Street, but I knew when we had reached it by the solid volume of
+shouting that escaped from the high concrete building into the dim
+neighborhood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Inside, the court was an immense expanse with granite-laid walls, a long
+rectangle, one side of which was formed by the steeply banked rows of
+spectators. Regular spaces were marked by white lines on the playing
+floor, and at one end the score was hung against the names of the
+players, now two teams--the Azules and the Blancos. The boxes were above
+the cement ledges packed with standing men, by a promenade, where the
+betting was conducted, cigars sold, and a small active bar maintained.
+It was the night of a gala benefit, for the Damas de Caridad, and I had
+been fortunate in getting a single box seat. I was late, though, and the
+game progressing; still, I was the first in our railed space; but the
+others, who proved to be Americans, soon followed--three prosperous men,
+manufacturers I thought, with wives in whom native good taste had been
+given the opportunities of large resources.
+
+One of the women--who, in the arrangement of the box, sat beside
+me--smiled with a magnetism that had easily survived the loss of her
+youth; she was rather silent than not, but the rest swept into a
+conversation in their best public manner. A man accompanying them, it
+developed, knew Cuba and Jai Alai, and he secured for the amusement of
+the others a cesta, the basket-like racquet worn strapped to the arm. It
+was from him I discovered that the court was two hundred and ten feet
+long and thirty-six feet wide; while the service consisted in dropping
+the ball and, on its rebound, catching it in the cesta and throwing it
+against the far end wall. From there, with a sharp smack audible all
+over the Fronton, the ball shot back, if not a fault, within a marked
+area, and one of the opposing side caught it, in the air or on the first
+bounce, and returned it against the end wall. At first I could see
+nothing but the violent activity of the players, frozen into statuesque
+attitudes of throwing; vigorous figures in, mostly, white, with soft red
+silk sashes. I heard the ball hit, and saw it rolling out of play; and
+then, with some slight realization of the rapidity of its flight, I was
+able to follow the course from cesta to wall and floor.
+
+There had never been, I was certain, another game in which instantaneous
+judgment, skill, and endurance had been carried to such a far point.
+There was seldom a fault or error; the ball, flying like a bullet, was
+caught and flung with a single gesture; again and again it carried from
+one end wall to the other, from which it was hurled on. Angles of flight
+were calculated and controlled, the long side wall was utilized.... Then
+a player of the Azules was hit in the ankle, and the abruptness with
+which he went down showed me a possibility I had ignored.
+
+During this the clamor of the audience was indescribable, made up, for
+the most part, of the difficulties of constantly shifting odds and
+betting. The odds changed practically with every passage of the ball:
+opening at, say, five to three against the favorites, as they drew
+steadily ahead in a game of twenty-five points it jumped to eight to
+four, ten to three, anything that could be placed. On the floor a small
+company of bookmakers, distinguished by their scarlet caps, shouted in
+every direction, and betting paper was thrown adroitly through the air
+in hollow rubber balls. Those who had backed at favorable odds the team
+now far ahead were yelling jubilantly, and others were trying, at the
+expense of their lungs, to cover by hedging their probable losses.
+
+There was, however, toward what should have been the end, an
+unlooked-for development--the team apparently hopelessly behind crept
+up. An astounded pause followed, and then an uproar rose that cast the
+former sound into insignificance. Soon the score was practically tied:
+there were shrill entreaties, basso curses, a storm of indiscriminate
+insults. Now the backers of the lesser couple scrambled vocally to take
+advantage of the betting opportunities forever lost--the odds were even,
+then depressed on the other side. When the game was over the noise died
+instantly: men black with passion, shaking with rage, crushing their
+hats or with lifted clenched fists, at once conversed with smiling
+affability. My eyes had been badly strained, and I was glad to leave the
+box and stroll along the promenade. The betting counters were jammed by
+the owners of winning tickets, the men behind the bar were, in their own
+way, as active as the pelota players.
+
+The majority of the boxes were occupied by Cuban families, but yet there
+was an appreciable number of foreigners. A slender girl, in a low dinner
+dress, was sitting on the railing of her box, swinging a graceful
+slipper and smoking a cigarette--New York was indelibly stamped on
+her--and, among the masculine world of Spanish antecedents, she created
+a frank center of interest. For her part, she studied the crowd quite
+blocking the way below her with a cold indifference, the personification
+of young assured arrogance.
+
+A quiniela followed, with six contestants, one against the other in
+successive pairs; but my eyes were now definitely exhausted by the
+necessarily shifting gaze, and my interest fastened on the woman beside
+me. She was at once intimately attached to the people with her and
+abstracted in bearing: a woman not far from fifty, but graceful still
+and, in a flexible black silk crepe with a broad girdle of jet, still
+desirable. It seemed to me that, in spite of an admirable manner, she
+was a little impatient at the volubility around her; or it might be, in
+contradiction to this, she was exercising a patience based on fortitude.
+It was clear that she hadn't a great deal in common with the man who had
+evidently been married to her for a considerable length of years. They
+spoke little--it was he who had fetched the cesta--both immersed in
+individual thoughts. A woman, I decided, finely sensitive, superior;
+who, as she had grown older, had found no demand for the qualities which
+she knew to be her best.
+
+A painful situation, a shocking waste, from which, for her, there was no
+escape, for she had patently what was known as character. She at once
+was conscious of the absolute need for spiritual freedom and bound by
+commitments paramount to her self-esteem. But even if she had been more
+daring, less conscientious, what could she have gained; what was there
+for her in a society condemned to express the spirit in the terms of
+flesh? She had too much charm, too great a vitality, to be absorbed in
+the superficial affairs of women, the substitute life of charity. And
+once married, probably to a man the model of kindly faith, she was
+caught in a desert of sterile monotony. Even children, I could see, if
+they existed, had not slain her questioning attractive personality.
+
+She smiled at me again, later, her narrow slightly wasting hands clasped
+about a knee--a smile of sympathetic comprehension and unquenchable
+woman. She would have been happier chattering in the obvious strain of
+stupidity behind her: any special beauty was always paid for in the
+imposed loneliness of a spoken or unspoken surrounding resentment. To be
+content with a facile compliment, the majority of tricks at auction
+bridge, mechanical pleasures, was the measure of wisdom for women in
+her situation. The last quiniela over, plainly weary she gathered a
+cloak about her shoulders and left the box, without, as I had hoped,
+some last gesture or even a word: and I pictured her sitting listlessly,
+distraught, in the cafe to which they were proceeding.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pelota immediately vanished from my mind before the infinitely more
+fundamental and interesting problem of marriage; and--remembering the
+ominous sign of a woman's club on the Malecon--I wondered if the Cuban
+women were contented with the tradition as it had been handed down to
+them. In the life that I knew in the north, an infinitesimal grain of
+sand irritating in the body of the United States, the sacredness of
+matrimony had waned very seriously; it would, of course, go on, probably
+for ever, since no other arrangement could be thought of conciliating
+the necessities of both dreams and property; but, subjected to the
+scrutiny of intelligence rather than sentimentality, it seemed both
+impotent and foolish. The impotence certainly, for whereas my
+grandfather had thirteen children and my mother four--or was it five?--I
+had none. There had always been individuals unrestrained by the
+complicated oaths of the wedding service--a strictly legal proceeding to
+which the church had been permitted to add its furbelows--dissatisfied
+ladies, and gentlemen of the commercial road. I wasn't referring to
+them, but to the look, at once puzzled, humorous, and impatient, that
+lately I had seen wives of probity turn on their husbands.
+
+They expressed the conviction that the purely masculine aphorism to the
+effect that home was the place for women meant nothing more than a
+clearing of the decks for unrestricted action. This was beautifully
+displayed, confirmed, in Havana, where decks were without a single
+impediment; and I speculated about the attitude of the Cuban women in
+houses barred with both actual and metaphorical iron. Tradition weighed
+heavily on their outlook; but there was that club on the Malecon.
+Tradition had bound the farm wives of Pennsylvania, yet they were
+progressively rebelling against the insanity of endless labor and
+isolation. But, perversely, the married groups I saw in Havana were
+remarkably close, simple, and happy. They sat in rows at the concerts on
+the plazas, went off on small excursions, in entire harmony--a thing
+impossible to the born American, with whom such parties began in
+exasperation and ended in nervous exhaustion. An American husband, of
+the class largely evident in Havana, escorted his family abroad with
+truculence and an air of shame at being exposed in such a ridiculous
+situation. If there was more than one household implicated, the men
+invariably drew away together: there was a predominance of cursing and
+the wails of irritably smacked children. The truth was that the citizens
+of the United States, in their feverish passage through life, had
+decidedly a poor time--either restlessness or ambition or
+dissatisfaction destroyed their peace of mind. Labor, more highly paid
+than at any other place or time, got less satisfaction for its money
+than a Cuban mestizo with a peseta.
+
+My thoughts returned abruptly to the point where they had started, to
+marriage, and I hoped that Cuba wouldn't be disorganized by the present
+ferment; that the feminine element, discovering their wrongs, wouldn't
+leave their balconies and patios for the dusty publicity of the street.
+Already a decline had been suffered, first in the loss of mantillas and
+combs, next in the passing of single-horse victorias for unrestrained
+tin locomotives, and then in the hideous flood of electric lighting.
+Still, a great deal of the charm, the empire, of Havana women remained;
+while nothing but utter disaster approached them from the north.
+
+This was no new position for me, and it had never failed to be attacked,
+usually with the insinuation that, spiritually, I was part of Turkey in
+Asia ... a place of gardens where it was not inconceivable that I'd be
+happy: certainly the politics there were no worse than those to which I
+had been inured from birth, with murder on the streets at noon
+distinguished by a white ribbon in its buttonhole. The Armenians were no
+more precariously situated than the Albigenses under Innocent III. I had
+heard, as well, that the governments of Cuba had not been free from
+suspicion, but it was hoped that elections supervised from the United
+States would institute reform. Rare irony! Elections, I should have
+said, going back once more to the beginning, opening to emancipated
+women.
+
+Gathering, in imagination, all the feminine world of Havana into a
+fragrant assembly, I begged them not to separate themselves from their
+privileges; I implored them even--against my personal inclination, for
+there, at least, I was no Turk--not to grow slender, if that meant agile
+excursions into loud spheres of lesser influence. Those others, I
+proceeded, would rapturously exchange a ballot for a seductive ankle, a
+graceful breast, or a flawless complexion. Complexion, or rather its
+absence, brought immeasurably more supporting votes to the women's party
+than convictions. And I added, reprehensibly, some of the things I had
+been privately told, as a writer, by women newly in the professions: I
+exposed the secret of a lecturer on civic improvement--or it might have
+been better babies; I couldn't recall which--who carried a handbagful of
+apostrophies to Paolo and Francesca, and that illogical lot, on her
+travels. She permitted me to read them in a sunny orchard where the
+apples were already, more than ripe, on the ground; and her gaze had
+persistently strayed to the wasting fruit.
+
+The audience melted away--I was unable to discover if they were
+flattered or annoyed--and I found myself actually seated at one of the
+small tables on the fringe of the the dansant at the Sevilla. The
+Cascade Orchestra from the Biltmore, their necks hung with the imitation
+wreaths of Hawaii, were playing a musical pastiche of many lands and a
+single purpose; and there, foxtrotting intently among girls from the New
+York Follies and girls on follies of their own, colliding with race
+track touts from Jefferson Park and suave predatory gentlemen of San
+Francisco, I found a whole section of young Cuba.
+
+They returned, in the intermissions, to chaperons complacent or secretly
+disturbed, where they had, principally, refrescos; but their attitude
+was one of progress and conscious, patronizing superiority to
+old-fashioned customs. The daughters of what, in many aspects, was the
+Spanish-Cuban aristocracy of the island, were dancing publicly in a
+hotel. Here, already, was an example of emancipation. I disliked it,
+naturally, not on moral grounds, but because it foreshadowed the
+destruction of individuality, the loss, eventually, of Havana, of Cuba,
+of Spain ... of everything distinguished that saved the world from
+monotony.
+
+They danced--the Cuban youth--with notable facility, adding to the
+hesitation waltz something specially their own, a more intense rhythm, a
+greater potentiality; their bodies were at once more fluid and positive;
+they were swept up into a mood unknown to the adamant ornaments of
+Country Club verandas in the north. A cosmopolitan waiter, anxious to
+have me finish and move on, hovered about the table, ignorant of a
+traditional courtesy as well as of the requirements of the climate. All
+the objectionable features of Broadway cafes, of public ostentation,
+mingled servility and insolence, dishonesty--my pina colado was diluted
+beyond taste--were being flung, with the air of a favor, into Havana.
+Although, for the best, I was even then a little late, I was glad that I
+had seen the city when I did, just as I was glad to have known Venice
+before the Campanile fell, and the Virginia Highlands when they had not
+been modernized. The change of Havana within itself, from palm thatch to
+marble, was entrancing; but the arbitrary imposition of stupid habits,
+standards, conduct, from outside, damnable.
+
+In the end the waiter was more forceful than my determination to remain
+until my drink and thoughts were at an end, and I rose with them
+uncompleted, in a very ill temper. If Cuba hadn't enough innate taste
+and nationality to save herself, she must go the popular way to
+obliteration. So much else had gone! But later, at the Hotel de Luz,
+untouched yet by the hand of imported cupidity, my happiness in Havana
+returned.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Hotel de Luz, inimitably Cuban, with the shipping lying vaguely
+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.
+
+Or, in Havana, of the oranges. In the meanwhile the patios gave me an
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My interest, however, in the American in Havana had vanished, my
+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.
+
+The approved style was white plaster, a story and a half high, with an
+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.
+
+An extremely bad period, that, when I tried to write without knowledge
+or support, reaching from twenty until well after thirty, when I managed
+to sell a scrap of prose. From then until forty the time had gone in a
+flash, a scratching of the pen: it seemed incredible that the seven
+books on a shelf bearing my name had been the result of so brief, so
+immaterial, a time. Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba, gazing
+peacefully into the dim expensive space of a room in the Hotel
+Inglaterra, congratulating myself on the loss, the positive lapse, of
+what was called men's most valuable possession.
+
+No better place for the trying of my sincerity than Havana existed; no
+other city in the world could so perfectly create the illusion of
+complete irresponsibility, of happiness followed for its own sake, as an
+end, or as the means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and plazas and
+promenades, its alternating sparkle and languor, like flags whipping in
+the wind or drooping about their staffs, always conveyed a spirit of
+holiday and of a whole absence of splenetic censure. At the bottom of
+this the climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days and nights
+stirring with a breeze through the galleries, concentrated the mind and
+body on pleasure.
+
+Night had always been the time for gaiety, when the practical was veiled
+in shade; and Havana responded with an inimitable grace to the stars.
+It was constructed for night, like a lunar park of marble and palms and
+open flooding radiance; with, against that, streets packed with darkness
+and doors of mystery to which clung the faint breath of patchouli. The
+air was instinct with seduction, faintly touched by the pungency of Ron
+Bacardi and limes, and bland with the vapors of delightful cigars. The
+clothes, too--the white linens and flannels and silks of the men; the
+ruffled dresses on the balconies, the flowery laces, like white
+carnations, in the automobiles; the wide hats of Paris and the satin
+slippers tied about the ankles, with preposterous heels; the fluttering
+fans--all, all were in the key of light sharp emotion, of challenge and
+invitation and surrender.
+
+Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana, any philosophy in the face of
+that charm, was unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a farther
+development of this, tacitly left to my own devices and thoughts, as if
+there were a general perception of my remoteness from the affair in
+hand. I was suffered to come and go without notice; no one, much, spoke
+to me; even those not unaware of the possibility of a book, of San
+Cristobal de la Habana, in which their city would find praise, were
+hardly stirred to interest. The moment to go to Havana was youth, the
+moment for masked balls and infidelity and champagne: its potency for me
+lay in its investment of memories; I regarded it as a spectacle set in
+the tropics. I was an onlooker and not a participant. But I had, as I
+have shown, no regret; I had become reconciled not only to the fleetness
+of time, but equally to the fact that my role was necessarily a
+spectator's. Hour after hour, year after year, I sat writing at the low
+window which looked out over my green terrace and clipped hedge, to the
+road, to life, beyond.
+
+Above everything, then, I was satisfied with the Havana I knew. From the
+standpoint of actuality my comprehension was limited--I was familiar
+with only a certain narrow part of the city, for it was my habit to go
+back to what I had found rather than discover the new--perhaps ten
+streets and a handful of houses, parks, and cafes. Too much to get into
+a score of books. What I had lost, I thought further--if, indeed, I had
+ever possessed it--was a warm personal contact such as I should have had
+dancing with a lovely girl. I never danced, but remained outside,
+philosophically, gazing at the long bright whirling rectangles.
+
+At the Inglaterra there were many men older than myself who danced
+persistently and had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too, wore
+flowers in their coats, but aggressive and not reminiscent blooms. They
+formed most of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't much youth
+among them, but I didn't envy them in the slightest. They were, if
+possible, more absurd than the women unmindful of thickening waists and
+dulled eyes. Their ardor was febrile and their power money; and every
+time they escorted with a quickened step their charmers past young dark
+men, the charmers glanced back appealingly. It was different with the
+Cubans, who regarded such things more naturally, and did not,
+practically, in consequence, get drunk.
+
+The noise from San Rafael Street never slackened, the clamor of the
+mule-drivers and the emptying cans of refuse took the place of the motor
+signals; the slats of my lowered shutters showed streaks of dawn. I
+turned once, it appeared, and the room was filled with indirect
+sunlight, the hands of my watch were at ten. It was eleven before I was
+dressed, with the morning cup of black coffee empty on a table; at
+twelve I had breakfast, and until five I idly read. The evening as well
+was idle--a thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvious and active
+standards. I thought, with no impulse to return, of the house near the
+Arsenal, which had, in effect, been open for centuries and which, unless
+life were purified, would never close. The purity I meant was not a
+limitation of passion, but its release from obscene confines. It didn't
+matter what I meant and, again, I was becoming too serious ... or not
+serious about the correct things. There was perpetually the danger of
+being overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early flight, by the
+influences, the promptings, of my heredity and strong first
+associations. What an amazing climax to my records of chiffon textures
+and moods of chiffon that would be: shouting the creed of a bitter Scots
+induration from the informal pulpits of the streets! Or I might publish,
+to the dismay of every one intimately concerned, a denunciatory
+sermonizing book. But what the subject was wouldn't matter, as it had
+not mattered with Jeremy Taylor, if it were written with sufficient
+beauty. Disagreeable books, too, in spite of the accepted contrary
+belief, were always very highly esteemed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was easy enough to account for Jeremy Taylor by the vague
+generalization of beauty, and I forced myself to a closer scrutiny of
+that term and my meaning. The words beauty and love, and a dozen others,
+like old shoes, had grown so shapeless through long mis-wear that they
+would stay on no foot. I tried to isolate some quality indisputably
+recognizable as beautiful and hit, to my surprise, on intellectual
+courage. The thought of an undeviating mental integrity was as
+exhilarating as the crash of massed marching bands. Then, searching for
+another example, I recalled August nights at Dower House, with the
+moonlight lying like water between the black shadows of the trees on the
+lawn. There was a harsh interwoven shrilling of locusts and the
+echo--almost the feel rather than the sound--of thunder below the
+horizon. This, too, stirred me profoundly, brought about the glow
+transmutable into creative effort.
+
+Another excursion found nothing but a boy and a girl, any boy and any
+girl, fired by shy uncomplicated passion.... A mental, a visual, and a
+natural incentive, each with the same effect, the identical pinching of
+the heart and thrust to a common hidden center. What had they each
+alike? Perhaps it was this: that they were the three great facts of
+existence, the primary earth, the act of creation, and the crowning
+dignity, the superiority of men who, somehow, had transvalued the sum of
+their awarded clay. Somehow! I had no intention of examining that. The
+fact was, for me, enough.
+
+There was, however, another phase of beauty still, one peculiarly the
+property of novelists, which had to do not with life at all, but with
+death, with vain longing and memories and failure. All the novels which
+seemed to me of the first rank were constructed from these latter
+qualities; and while painting and music and lyrical poetry were
+affirmative, the novel was negative, built, where it was great, from
+great indignations. Yet, while this was obvious truth, it failed to
+include or satisfy me; for there were many passages not recognizable as
+great in the broadest sense, both in literature and life, that filled me
+with supreme pleasure--there were pages of Turgenev spun out of the
+fragile melancholy of a girl, a girl with a soul in dusk, far more
+enthralling than, for example, Thomas Hardy. It may have been that there
+was the perception of a similitude between Turgenev's figure and myself;
+certainly I was closer to her mood, her disease of modernity, than to a
+sheep herder; and there was a possibility, for my own support, that the
+finest-drawn sensibilities, not regarded as emotions in the grand key,
+would turn out to be our most highly justified preoccupation.
+
+I was, at present, in Havana, submerged in its fascination, and when I
+came to write about it there would not be lacking those to say that I
+had been better occupied with simpler things. Hugh Walpole had warned me
+of the danger, to me, of parquetry and vermilion Chinese Chippendale;
+and I was certain that he would speak to me again in the same tone about
+idling in a mid-Victorian Pompeii, celebrating drink and marble touched
+by the gilder's brush of late afternoon. Perhaps Walpole--and Henry
+Mencken's keen friendly discernment--was right; but, damn it, my
+experience was deficient in material essentials; I was dangerously
+ignorant of current reality, and I doubted if my style was a suitable
+instrument for rugged facts.
+
+What remained for me, an accomplishment spacious enough for anyone, was
+the effort to realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm
+delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained
+in the face of imminent destruction. And in that category none was
+sharper than the charm of a woman, so soon to perish, in a vanity of
+array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly. The thought of such a
+woman, the essence, the distillation, of an art of life superimposed on
+sheer economy, was more moving to me than the most heroic maternity. I
+couldn't get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of
+staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten,
+was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat of some
+kitchen drudge.
+
+The setting of a woman in a dress by Cheruit; a part of the bravery of
+fragile soft paste Lowestoft china and square emeralds that would feed a
+starving village, on fingers that had done no more than wave a fan; the
+fan itself, on gold and ivory with tasselled silk--the things to which
+the longing of men, elevated a degree above hard circumstances,
+turned--were of equal weight with the whole; for it was not what the
+woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her
+difference. On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other
+aesthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter.
+
+This, however wide apart it may seem, was closely bound to my presence
+in Havana, to my delight and purpose there. It was nothing more than a
+statement, a development, if not a final vindication, of my instant
+sense of pleasure and familiarity--a place already alive in my
+imagination. My special difficulty was the casting of it into a
+recognizable, adequate medium. There, in the plaiting of cobwebs instead
+of hemp rope, I particularly invited disaster. It wasn't necessary that
+I should sustain anyone, but only that I should spread the illusion of
+the buried associations and image of a brain. That, if it were true, I
+held, would be beauty.
+
+Here, at least, I was serious about the correct things, direct rather
+than conventional; all that mattered was the spreading of the illusion,
+the spectacle of what part of Havana I did know interpreted, realized,
+not in the spirit of an architectural plan, but as sentient with
+reflected emotions. Otherwise the most weighty charges against me were
+absolutely justified. If I couldn't make Havana respond in the key of my
+intrinsic feelings, if I had no authentic feeling with which to invest
+it, my book, almost all my books, were a weariness and a mistake.
+
+Novels of indignation or of melancholy, of a longing for the continuity
+of individual passion confronted with the inevitable--it was that, the
+perishability of all that was desirable, which gave to small things, a
+flower in the hair, their importance as symbols. The love story, once
+the exclusive province of fiction, had disappeared; it was now
+practically impossible for the slightest talent to fill a book in that
+manner. The romantic figment, like a confection of spun sugar with a
+sprig of artificial orange blossoms, had been discarded; the beauty of
+love, it had been discovered, wasn't the possession of a particular
+heart, but the tenderness, the pity, that came from the realization of
+its inescapable loss. No man could love a woman, no woman could love a
+man, who was to live forever; a thousand years would be an insuperable
+burden. The higher a cultivation, a delight, reached, the more tragic
+was its breaking by death; the greater knowledge a mind held, the more
+humiliating was the illimitable ignorance, the profound night pressing
+in upon every feeble and temporary human lamp.
+
+Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write, were composed, now, not so
+much from among the brasses, the tympani, as from the violins. The great
+majority, like the great books, were dedicated to the primary chords;
+but my reaching the former had been always hopeless. I didn't mind this,
+for I told myself that, while the structure of approbation I had
+gathered was comparatively modest, its stones and masonry were
+admirable; it was, if not a mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on
+earth--what was in England called, I believe, a freehold. It was mine,
+and there was no lease dependent on the good will--or on my
+subserviency--of any landlord.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of this went through my mind as I sat looking at my trunk, open on
+end in an alcove near the door, for I was gathering my clothes and
+thoughts in preparation for leaving Havana. One thing only that I wished
+to see now remained--the danzon at the National Theatre. I kept out a
+dark suit, one that would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's box;
+for I had been told that it was desirable to avoid unnecessary
+attention. There was, briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted--I
+had heard the same thing so often before without subsequent
+justification--but I could believe it possible if there was any violent
+discharge of primitive emotion. Here the spirit of Africa burned remote
+and pale, but it was still a tropical incomprehensible flame.
+
+A strip of red carpet led from the outer steps, across a large
+promenade, to the circular wall of the theatre; and though it was past
+eleven, the ball hadn't yet assumed an appearance of life. But just
+within the entrance a negro band began suddenly to play, and in the
+music alone I immediately found the potent actuality of danger. I was
+without the knowledge necessary to the disentangling of its elements:
+there were fiddles and horns and unnatural kettle drums, and an
+instrument made from a long gourd, with a parallel scoring for the
+scrape of a stick. The music was first a shock, then an exasperation
+hardly to be borne, but finally it assumed a rhythm maddening beyond
+measure.
+
+It was Africa and something else--notes taken from the Moors, splitting
+quavers of Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that might have been
+the agonized voice of the first Cubenos; with an unspeakable distortion,
+a crazy adaptation, of scraps of to-day. There was no pause, no
+beginning or end, in its form; it went on and on and on, rising and
+falling, fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and then a blasting
+discord--the savage naked utterance of a naked savage lust; it was a
+music not of passion, but of the frenzy of rape. Nothing like it would
+have been possible in writing, allowed in painting; only music was free
+to express, to sound, such depths. Nothing but music could have conveyed
+the inarticulate cries of the stirred mire that flooded the marble space
+of the opera house. It had lost the simplicity of its appropriate years,
+the spring orgies in the clearings of early forests; time had made it
+hideously menacing, cynical, and corrupt.
+
+At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro woman with a wheedling tainted
+manner tried to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger and pale,
+their faces coated with rice powder, went past in dragging satins. They
+were chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened cheeks and
+dead-looking mat-like hair, their coffee-colored breasts and white kid
+gloves, gave them an extraordinary incongruity; and behind them, as
+sharp as the whisper of their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered.
+Leaning forward on the rail of my enclosure, I gazed down over the
+floored expanse of the auditorium:
+
+The stage was set with the backdrop and wings of a conventional operatic
+design--a scene that would have served equally Aida or La Favorita: it
+towered, like a faded dream of pseudo-classic Havana, into the
+theatrical heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and charcoal grey, of
+loggias and peristyles and fountains; while in close order about its
+three sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live border of dancers.
+They were of every color from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster,
+to utter blackness. The men, for the most part, were light, some purely
+Spanish, the negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I could see no
+indisputably white women. There was a girl in a mantone of bright
+contrasting colors, a high comb and a rose in her hair, about whom there
+was a question. However, her partner was one of the few full negroes
+there; and, as they revolved below my box, it seemed that her skin had a
+leaden cast.
+
+The danzon itself had, at first, the appearance of a sustained gravity:
+it was danced slowly, in very small space, following the music with
+arbitrary reverses, and pausing. There might have been, to the
+superficial view, a restraint almost approaching dignity had the dancers
+been other. The men, without exception, wore their stiff straw hats and
+smoked cigars through every evolution; and the dresses, the dressing, of
+the women were fantastic: a small wasted girl, dryly black, had copied
+the color and petals of a sunflower. As she revolved, her skirt flared
+out from legs like bent bones, and a hat of raw yellow flapped across
+her grotesque ebony countenance.
+
+The danzon, for a moment, in spite of the music played continuously and
+alternately by two orchestras occupying a box on either side of the
+stage, seemed formal. Then, abruptly, a couple lost every restraint, and
+their maddened spinning and furious hips tore the illusion to shreds.
+And slowly I began to be conscious of a poisonous air, a fetid air as
+palpable as the odors and scents--the breath, the premonition, of the
+danger of which I had been warned. It lay in an ugly hysteria of rasped
+emotions that at any illogical accident might burst into the shrillness
+of a knife. It wasn't dangerous so much as it was abjectly wicked--the
+deliberate calling up of sooty shapes that had better be kept buried. It
+was unimportant that the men below me were, in the daytime, commonplace
+clerks; the women could be anything chance had made them: here, to the
+spoiled magic of Carabalie nights, they were evoking a ceremonial of
+horror.
+
+Personally, since I had no hopes to save or plans to protect, I hadn't
+the desire, like Sampson, to pull down the pillars of the roof on their
+debased heads. I enjoyed it remarkably; the more because I saw,
+scattered among the crowd, figures of unreal and detrimental beauty--a
+creamy magnificence in creamy satin with a silver band on her forehead;
+a yellow creature with oblique eyes in twenty white flounces and a
+natural garland of purple flowers; a thing of ink, of basalt carved by
+an opulent chisel, on whose body clothes were incidental; and corrupt
+graces perfect in youth and figure weaving the patterns, the wisdom, of
+Sodom.
+
+One o'clock passed, then two and three, but there was no abatement in
+the danzon. A middle-aged man, with an abstracted air, danced without
+stopping for an hour and fifty minutes. His partner, flushing through
+her dark skin, was expensively habited: her fingers and throat glittered
+coldly with diamonds and her hat was swept with long dipping plumes. She
+had a malignant mouth and eyes a thick muddy brown, and it was clear
+that she hated the man in whose arms she was turning. I wondered about
+her hatred and the patience, the indifference, of the other: how
+revolting she would be in a few hours, livid and ghastly in the morning.
+He, probably, would then be standing at a high desk, counting dollars
+with integrity or adding columns of figures, precise and respectable in
+an alpaca coat. An older man still was dancing by himself, intent on the
+intricate stepping of his own feet. His agility soon won an admiring
+circle, and his violence increased with the applause: he jumped in the
+air, clapping his heels together, and his arms waved wildly--a
+marionette pulled convulsively by wires in strange merciless hands.
+
+I imagined a fetish, a large god, on the stage, drooping over his
+swollen belly, with a hanging lip and hands set in his loins. His legs
+were folded, lost in flesh ... a squatting smeared trunk of hideous
+service. Around him were the seated rows of worshippers, on either hand
+was his jangling praise; and before him revolved the dancers in his
+rite. The music throbbed in my brain like a madness that would have
+dragged me down to the floor. I speculated fleetly over such a
+surrender, the drop, through countless ages, of that possible descent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was, however, only just to add that the idol of Guinea suffered
+unduly from his surroundings and the age in which he was exposed; in his
+place, his time, he had been neither a monster nor unnatural, but
+nothing more than the current form of worship. He, Bongo, had had the
+misfortune to be catapulted, together with his congregation, through
+twenty, forty, centuries, in a breath, on the magic carpet of greed, and
+put down in a day where he was not only obsolete, but repudiated. Men
+saw him with the sense of horror generated by a blasting view of their
+own very much earlier selves. For the difference between the negro, the
+Carabalies, or Macua, and the Spaniards of the sixteenth century in Cuba
+was, at heart, historical in time only. They were members--we were all
+members--of one family. The innocence of a bare black, torn like a
+creeper from the support of his native tree, tatooed with necessary
+charms, medicines, against jungle fears and fevers, had more to dread
+from Amador de Lares than any later Christians owed to an arbitrarily
+imported savagery. What, in reality, occurred, was implied on the wide
+floor of the opera house, was that the negroes, unable to change their
+simplicity as easily as they superficially diluted their skins, kept
+their innocent habits, their tastes in noise and religion and
+misconduct; but, in the dress of civilization, these took on the aspect
+of a grotesque defiled horror. With this, too, in an earnest effort to
+assimilate as much as possible of their enforced land, they caught such
+bright fragments of life as struck them--the glass beads and bits of gay
+cloth--and copied them prodigiously. The confusion which followed was a
+tragedy in the comic spirit--a discordant mingling that provoked
+laughter, quickly stopped by a deeper understanding and by pity. The
+past vital still: with the entrance of the African slave into the West,
+it was exactly as though a figure in the paint and feathers of voodoo
+had been thrust into a polite salon.
+
+The spectacle had none of the comfortable features of a mere exhibition;
+for the revulsion came from a spiritual shudder in the beings of the
+onlookers; while the other injured individuals saw that, as clothes, the
+crude partial imitation of a rooster was insufficient. They, the latter,
+commendably hurried into trousers and pot hats, into satin trains and
+pink tulle and white kid gloves; but the transition was too hurried, too
+optimistic, and the resulting incongruity ... I was not a student of
+ethnology, I had no theory of races, but, gazing down from my box, it
+seemed to me that yesterday could not be instantly combined with to-day;
+it was evident that there was no short way by a long and painful
+business of evolution.
+
+Nothing more unfortunate could well be imagined; for, in the retributive
+manner I had already mentioned, the Africa buried in the West, so long
+forgotten, took life again, and the danger to everyone had been acute
+through a long period of Havana's years. We, in temperate zones, in
+weathers that had no need of the protection of a special dark pigment,
+had been lucky; but we were trying our luck very severely by subjecting
+it to the old potencies not yet entirely lost. The danzon was, actually,
+in a way beyond legislation, a masked ball in black and white, where the
+unmasking was involuntary and fateful.
+
+One, I thought, spoiled the other, like an incomplete experiment in
+chemistry where nothing but an opaque liquid and an intolerable stench
+was evolved. Perhaps, with acute necessity, a successful clear result
+would reward the future with peace; but it wouldn't happen in my
+knowledge; I hadn't a thing in the world to do with it. What occurred to
+me then was the useful fact that the present scene afforded the right,
+the only, ending for my story, The Bright Shawl. It would have to be
+tragic, but only indirectly; nothing, I had decided, should happen to my
+principal character beyond a young moment of supreme romance. No, the
+mishap, death, must envelop his friend, the patriotic Cuban. He'd be
+killed by a Spanish officer, through a woman--a woman in the bright
+shawl of the dancer that had been preserved as a memento of tender
+regard.
+
+Some arrangement was necessary, perhaps a prostitute. Well--I had seen
+her, in virginal white muslin, with the weight of her head, its oval
+flattened by the hand of China, her heavy hair, inclined on its slender
+neck: a figure, in my pages, impassively fateful, remote as I had seen
+her seated in a gay company. That finished the story, for the youthful
+American, after a vain public effort to secure for himself the dignity
+of a heroic end, would be ignominiously deported from Cuba. I had been
+often asked how I arrived at my plots, but more often accused of never
+reaching an intelligible plan, and, until now, I'd been incapable of
+giving an explanation satisfactory even to myself; but here was one
+accounted for to a considerable degree. It had begun by an instinctive
+attachment to a city, to Havana; and the emotions brought into being had
+crystallized into a plan, for me, unusually concise.
+
+There was a temptation, to be avoided, to tell it in the first person; a
+version that had come to be disliked almost as universally as a set of
+letters. Some celebrated stories had been written that way--Youth--but I
+felt that it was an unnecessary charge on sympathy. While the creation
+of character was no longer the tyrant it had been, a certain air of
+veracity was most desirable, and the limited scope of a single
+intelligence discussing, explaining, himself was too marked. The great
+trouble with the romantic novels up to the very present had been that
+there was never a doubt of the ultimate happiness of all who should be
+happy and the overwhelming misery of those who should be miserable. No
+peril was the father of a thrill, because from its inception it was
+plainly impotent to harm the lovely and the brave. The pleasure had from
+witnessing a dexterous job was lost in an artifice that seldom
+approached an art. But we'd improved that, an improvement expressed in
+the utter loss of the word hero; no man, or woman, was now entirely safe
+in the hands of his romantic author; the two manners had come creditably
+together.
+
+I had become, subconsciously, interested in a girl pausing on the floor,
+and, in response to my scrutiny, she glanced up with a shadowy smile. I
+gazed with instant celerity and fixedness at the ceiling, then at the
+upper boxes opposite, since below, indiscretion was laid like a trail of
+powder, of explosive rice powder. There was no cutting in at that ball.
+She was more than charming, too, with her mixed blood evident in her
+carriage, her indolence, rather than in feature. She wore blue, a wisely
+simple dress that showed small feet, like butterflies in their
+lightness, and the instinctive note of a narrow black velvet band on her
+throat.
+
+An air of sadness rested on her, on, principally, a superiority anyone
+could see. Her fan opened and shut in a thin pointed hand. A maid, I
+told myself, reflecting the aristocracy of the closets of delicate
+clothes in her charge, scented from the gold-stoppered bottles of her
+mistress. She was another phase of what had been going on at such length
+through my mind--a different catastrophe, since she was denied the
+reward of the virtues in either of the races that had made her. In
+Boston she would have become a bluestocking, a poet singing in minor
+cadence to traditional abolitionists become dilettantes, but in Cuba,
+tormented by the strains of the danzon:
+
+There, her flax burning in resentment and despair, she might be
+extinguished in the tide restlessly sweeping to the troubled coast of
+Birrajos: or, at Havana, carried into the secrets of the Nanigos: in the
+black cabildo of that society, provision was made for a woman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was significant that the first organization of naniguismo in Cuba was
+purely African, for the hatred of its members, Carabalies, for the white
+race made the admission of even mulattos impossible. This
+society--tierra or juego--was formed during the administration of
+General Tacon, in the village of Regla, and called Apapa Efi. It was,
+against the protests of its originators at sharing the secret with too
+many, enlarged, and spread through the outskirts of Havana. There the
+mulattos greatly outnumbered the blacks, and they formed a society of
+their own, its oath sworn in Ancha del Norte Street, named Ecobio Efo
+Macarara. They insisted on a common brotherhood and their right of
+entering the fambas, the ceremonial rooms; but there was a determined
+opposition, open battle and murder in Perserverancia and Lagunas
+Streets. After this there was a general meeting at Marianao, the early
+bar to color, as distinguished from black, removed, and the infusion of
+the dark ritual of Efi into white blood began. When, ten years after, an
+indiscriminate society, the Ecobio Efo, was terminated by the
+authorities, Spanish nobles and professional men were assisting in the
+rites.
+
+What had started upon the African river Oldan as a tribal religion took
+on, in Havana, a debased version of Rome, and the veneration of Santa
+Barbara was added to the supreme worship of Ecue, a figure vaguely
+parallel to the Holy Ghost, created in the sounding of a sacred drum.
+And what, equally, in the Carabalie Bricamo was Dibo, God, became in
+Cuba an organization of criminals and finally, when its more obvious
+aspects were stamped out, a corrupt political influence. There, in the
+clearest possible manner, was traced the eventual effect of so much
+heralded superiority, such enormous advantages, on native belief.
+
+There could be no doubt, though, of the fact that, in any pretence of
+civilization, the nanigos were detrimental; it was unavoidable that they
+should have degenerated into a savage menace, not only in overt acts,
+which were not lacking, but in practices of mental and emotional horror.
+Their ceremony, with its strange vocables and distortions of meaning;
+the obscene words that were but symbols for obscenities beyond
+imagination; the character of their dance, which gave them the name
+arrastrados, men who dragged themselves, reptilian, on the ground--all
+combined in a poison like a gas sweeping from the morass of the past. It
+held, beneath its refuge and defiance of society, the appeal of a
+portentous secret, bound in blood, the fascination, the fetishism, of
+orgiastic rituals, and, under that, stronger still, delirious barbarity.
+
+Its legend was not different from the others which formed the primitive
+bases of subsequent elaborate beliefs: the miracle, with an attending
+baptism, was consummated by a woman, Sicanecua, who found a crying
+fish--the fish was a sacred Christian sign--in her jar of water. In
+recognition of this she was sacrificed and her blood put to a holy use,
+and the fish skinned for the drum, sounded by the fingers, used in his
+praise. Here Ecue, the divine, was baptized by Efo in the Oldan, who in
+turn signed his disciple. And about that tradition, guarded--with its
+instrument--in the altar, Ecue sese, the degenerate elements and
+characters of modern naniguismo gathered. There were, necessarily,
+changes in the Cuban form of worship--the skin of a goat was substituted
+for the unprocurable variety of fish, and the timbre of the original
+drum secured by an artifice. The need, as well, of finding another
+anointment than human blood, difficult to procure in Havana, led to the
+sacrifice of the rooster or a goat. This, now, had a crucifix, with the
+profession that God, Dibo, must be over everything, and a sacramental
+singing; but not the Te Deum or Laudes ... Efore sisi llamba, and the
+reply Ho Isueribo engomo ... Mocongo! while the Empego, the clerk of
+the service, shifted brightly colored curtains and enveloping
+handkerchiefs and marked with yellow chalk the head and body and palms
+of the initiates.
+
+A diablito had in charge the offices of the catechism--Come with me;
+where did you leave your feet; where I left my head! Enter where Bongo
+is and cry with your brother! Look at your brother because they want to
+choke him. He conducted the sacrifice of the goat, which, in a memorial
+of Guinea, was eaten with pointed sticks, with the drink Mucuba, made
+from sugar-cane rum and bitter broom. A strange procession followed, led
+by the Insue, with a woman in a shift, Sicanecue, and the diablito
+skipping backward. The sese, a silver crucifix with four black feathers,
+was carried, and later the remains of the feast were thrown into a
+cemetery.
+
+The effort to end naniguismo in Havana began in eighteen hundred and
+seventy-five, when its gatherings were forbidden; but, deeply
+traditional, it flourished in hidden places, in the jail where nanigos
+were confined and the cellars of Jesus Maria. Long before that the poet
+Placido had been killed; within a few years the Llamba named Hand on the
+Ground was judicially executed; and following the assassinations during
+the carnival of eighteen hundred and sixty-five, sweeping deportations
+were enforced. In Maloja Street a juego, Acaniran Efo Primero, with
+officers drawn from reputable quarters, was surprised; the next year the
+Abacua Efo was exterminated; a public clash of diablitos resulted in
+apprehensions; and twenty-five nanigos were taken on Vista Hermosa
+Street.
+
+It was, in reality, Africa in Havana, brought against its wish and to
+its tragic misfortune; and, planted in an alien soil, but among a common
+genus, the mysteries of religion, it grew into an aberration of all that
+gave it birth. Aside from this, its significance, for me, lay in its
+amazing language, an idiom, specifically, composed of the Carabalie
+Bricamo and a Spanish without articles or conjunctions, equally
+incapable of exact images and the expression of abstract thought. But
+taking the place of its omissions, was a congealing power of suggestion,
+of creating, through, apparently, no more than the jumbling of common
+terms and sounds, sensations of abject dread. The four bishops of the
+ritual, in their order, were Insue, Illamba, Mocongo, Empego. In
+naniguismo man was momban, an idiot was sansguere, a knife icua
+rebesine, a pistol etombre, immortality embiguei, the night erufie, war
+ochangana, the sun fanson, and worms cocorico. The language took short
+rigid forms, phrases; it had little if any plasticity: Amandido
+amanllurube, The day goes and the night comes. Efiquefi que buton efique
+Ename onton Ellego Efimeremo Iboito, Eurico sangacurici eurico sanga
+quimagua sanga nampe, nampe sanga mariba, The owl drinks the blood of
+the dead and flies to the sea.
+
+The terms of the acts of worship were particularly heavy, sultry, and
+held in their sound alone the oppressive significance of fetishes as
+black as the night from which they were shaped. The minister of death
+to Sinanecua, a ceremony which became traditional, was named
+Cuanon-Araferrobre, and the act of sacrifice the Acua Meropo. The
+singers before the altar, making visible the sacred stick, Baston
+Mocongo, intoned Mocongo Machevere, Mosongo moto cumbaba eribo, and
+Erendio basi Bome, I believe in God and God is great; with, at the last,
+silencing the profession of faith, the voice of the drum, tarinibongo.
+
+The nanigos had been driven from the streets through which, at first, on
+King's Day, Dia Reyes, they were permitted, once a year, to parade with
+native costumes and instruments--atables and marugas and ecous, a
+flattened bell struck by a thin stick. Their fambas were destroyed and
+hysteria cooled; but I wondered about both the secretiveness and the
+persistence of the primitive spirit and the delicate melancholy that
+veiled the girl so faintly tinged with carabalie, resting below my box
+through the rasping strains of the danzon. Had her gain been greater
+than the loss, the ruin, of her simplicity; had she, dragged abruptly
+from saurian shadows, been made white by an arbitrary papal sun?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A glimmering dawn, faintly salt with the presence of the sea, was
+evident in the Parque Central when I walked the short distance, not more
+than a few steps, from the opera house to the Inglaterra, my head filled
+with the resonant bos and bongos of naniguismo. Havana, for a moment,
+seemed like a cemetery--its own marble cemetery of Colon--where a black
+spirit, buried in a secret grave, walked and would not be still. I
+speculated about that same spirit in another connection--in its
+influence on painting and music, on Western literature. It had affected
+dancing profoundly, making it, in the United States, almost wholly its
+own; and the Spanish, with whom, in the richness of a tradition and
+perfect expression, no others could compete, owed a great debt to
+Africa. Our music, too, it had influenced to such a degree that it was
+doubtful if we had any outside the beat of negro strains.
+
+Stephen Foster, a great composer in that he had enclosed the whole
+sentiment of an age within his medium, was often but a paraphrase of a
+darker melody. Foster, like Havana, was Victorian, a period that dreamed
+of marble halls, set in a pitch impossible now, and yet, curiously,
+charged for an unsympathetic world with significant beauty. This negro
+contribution was in a melancholy and minor key, the invariable tone of
+all primitive song; in poetry, as well, a lyrical poetry nearly
+approaching music, there was an analogous coloring between the race and
+its shadowed measures.
+
+The reminiscent emotions that, with us, were mainly personal, in the
+negro were tribal; he had not been individualized, brought to a separate
+consciousness; and, in consequence, his song, practically lacking in
+intellect, dealt only with instinctive feelings. Growing shrill with
+passion and sinking to the monotonous laments of formless sorrow, it
+belonged equally to all the men, the women, who heard it--it was their
+voice and comprehensible triumph or pain; without artifice it wasn't
+artificial nor ever insincere; and, as a means of gold, a medium for
+lies, it had no existence. The voice of all, an instrument of natural
+beauty, shared by villages, its pure quality, brought in slave ships
+that rotted with their dead on the sea, gave the shallow and vitiated
+West a fresh earthen tonic chord.
+
+The negro, naturally, hadn't grown more cheerful in his new imposed
+setting; and it was possible that his music had gained an added depth,
+at any rate for our perception, from the weight of banishment and
+shackles. He had not turned with any success to creative accomplishment
+that needed mental independence and courage, or to forms, like the
+novel, wholly modern. On the other side, the novel, with all its
+trumpeted young freedom, had never, with even relative truth, expressed
+the negro in the Americas. This, a subject of appalling splendor, had,
+in the United States, been turned over to the comic spirit and short
+impressions--stories, superficially, falsely, pathetic. The fact was
+that we had enormously harmed the negro, and for that reason, in the
+familiar process of human self-esteem, nationally we were uneasy,
+resentful in his presence. We saw him, when we escaped from absolute
+hatred, as a figure, a subject, without dignity: we lacked there the
+penetrative sympathy which was the soul of imaginative fiction. Such a
+novel, I thought, was perhaps of everything that offered the best worth
+writing.
+
+Certainly nothing more difficult could be well attempted; my knowledge,
+in Havana and through the nanigos, had been perceptibly enlarged, and I
+was not unfamiliar with the state in which, I decided, the story must be
+laid--not in Virginia, but upon a level grey reach of Louisiana, cut by
+tideless bayous and saturated with the fever of cane and cypress brakes.
+A bitter novel like the broom herb put in the ceremonial drink Mucuba,
+pages from which it would be hard to exclude a fury of hopelessness! And
+what an angry disturbed wasplike hum it would provoke! No magazine, of
+course, would touch it--it would be sold, for a week or ten days, from
+under counters, and then we, my novel and myself, metaphorically burned.
+A magnificent project:
+
+A huddle of cabins at the edge of a wall of black pines beyond a deep
+ruined field--but perhaps this was South Carolina--infinitesimal ragged
+patches of corn, a sandy trail lost abruptly in the close forest, and
+half-naked portentous shapes. There would be a town back in the country
+with a desolate red square of great sprawling water-oaks smothered in
+hanging moss, a place at once old and raw, and ugly with vindictive
+ignorance.... The negroes were infinitely happier in Havana, where the
+heat, the palms, were their own; and I was surprised that they didn't
+desert the United States in a body for a suaver spirit in the air and
+man. Cuba, to a large measure, with what final result I wasn't
+concerned, had absorbed them in the manner that Spain had absorbed the
+Moors. Havana made some denial of this, and prided itself, with entire
+justice where it was true, on unmixed Castilian blood; but the other was
+perceptible in the gait, the very whiteness, of Cuba's principal
+city--the whitest walls on earth. This didn't bother me; I liked Havana
+from its farthest view to its most intimate facade, and I was grateful
+to whatever had made it.
+
+In my room the negro, with the danzon, faded from my mind; and I only
+paused to speculate dimly about his overwhelming preference, where a
+choice existed, for the Protestant religions instead of Roman
+Catholicism. I should have thought that the color, the imagery and
+incense, of the Catholic Church would be irresistible. Yet there were,
+in the United States, thousands of colored Methodists and Baptists for
+one adherent of Rome. It might be that the hymns of Methodism,
+sufficiently melancholy and barbarous in figure, God knew, were the
+reason--the character of the hymns and congregational singing, the loud
+pictorial shouts. The later religion of the negroes, in addition to what
+I had already considered, was a subject to be avoided; but running
+through my mind was the memory that in Richmond, not long ago, it was
+common in the evenings of spring for bands of negroes to go through the
+streets singing spirituals and constantly gathering others who dropped
+their work, their responsibilities, to join the passing chorus of hope.
+
+That was lost now, I understood, a vanished custom, killed by
+self-consciousness; but it would have been a fine thing to hear
+approaching and receding through the dusk, a stirring resinous volume or
+a mere vibrant echo, a dying whisper. Perhaps that, a dying whisper,
+would be the solving of the whole tragic difficulty--disease and winter
+and relentless natural laws. The latter moved with great deliberation
+through unlimited centuries, but the impatience of men demanded instant
+release from trouble. They wanted black black and white white, with no
+transition, no blurring of the edges; this was their dream, but they
+constantly defeated it, betrayed their ideal. Yes, it might be that the
+humility of that defeat, in the far future, would accomplish a
+universally white city. Only one other way offered: a different humanity
+from any which had yet appeared outside rare individuals ... but that
+vision seemed, to me, as fantastic as the sentence in Carabalie Bricamo
+that gave it expression, Eruco en llenison comunbairan abasi otete
+alleri pongo--We of this world are all together. The truth was, honestly
+at heart, that I couldn't commit myself to all, or even a quarter, of
+what this would have demanded. Impersonally I was able to see that, as
+an idea, it was superb, I realized that something of it must inform my
+pages; but it was useless to pretend that I could begin to carry it out
+or that I was, in practice, a Christian. I was tired, and my thoughts
+grew confused, but dimly in my mind was again the consciousness of the
+remote fate of the creative writer, an individual without even the
+desire to be a part of that for which he cried.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Certainly I had no marked love of humanity the following morning, caught
+with a small mob in a narrow passage of the wharf where I was waiting to
+board the steamer for Key West. I was between the water and a wooden
+partition, the heat was savage, and a number of youthful marines,
+returning home from Camagueey, were indulging in a characteristic
+humor--the dealing of unsuspected blows, of jarring force, among
+themselves. They shoved each other, in a crowd shoulder to shoulder,
+disregarding entirely the indirect results of their vigor, and exchanged
+threats of fulminating violence. They were not more annoying than the
+others, but only more evident; and, as the advertised time of departure
+was past by an hour, and then a second hour, and the sun found its way
+into our walled space, even the marines subsided. Every trace of
+dignity, in that heat, ran away from the people about me. While, on the
+whole, they were uncomplaining, even relatively considerate of others'
+discomforts, wondering, with weary smiles, when the boat would be off,
+I had no such kindly promptings.... I hated them all, the ugliness of
+the women and the men's dull or merely sharp faces, with an intensity
+that wasn't normal. When I was very young indeed, scarcely past two, I
+had been nearly crushed in a throng after the Sesquicentennial parade in
+Philadelphia; long afterward I had been, to all practical purposes,
+asphyxiated in a train that broke down in an Apennine tunnel; as a
+result, I had an unreasoning fear of crowded bodies or limited space;
+and this dread, before long, on the Havana wharf, turned into an acute
+aversion for every individual and thing about me.
+
+The surrounding insistent good nature developed in flashes of exchanged
+homely wit, varied by the attitudes of restraint, and, of them both, I
+couldn't tell which I resented more. The present position of the waiting
+people, the long exposure to the intolerable sun, was the result of
+their patience; of that and their personal inefficiency reflected in
+their official management. All the bad governments in the world, the
+dishonesty and universal muddles, were nothing more than monuments to
+the immeasurable stupidity and greed of the people; they were betrayed
+politically not by powerful and unscrupulous parties and men, but by
+themselves; perpetually and always by their own laziness and
+superstition and jealousy.
+
+The Cubenos, the original inhabitants of Cuba, were parcelled in the
+bondage of encomiendas, exterminated by the passion of the Spanish Crown
+for gold; when they had been sacrificed, Africa was raked by slavers for
+labor in the mines and planting; beneath every movement, instigated by
+hope or supported by returns, riches were the incentive and power. Men
+had never, within history and their secret hearts, cared for anything
+else: an ineradicable desire. There was a facile public gabble about the
+qualities of the spirit, about soul; but the solid fact of money, both
+as an abstraction and what conspicuously it brought, was what the people
+worshipped, wanted, what they schemed or stole for, or in the service
+of which they performed the most heroic toil.
+
+This was not, necessarily, an ignoble or negligible pursuit, but it was
+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
+
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