Part 4

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.