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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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