Part 10

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: