Part 2

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.