Part 7
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.