San Cristobal de la Habana Part 1

San Cristobal de la Habana.

by Joseph Hergesheimer.

There are certain cities, strange to the first view, nearer the heart than home. But it might be better to acknowledge that, perhaps, the word home has a wider and deeper significance than any mere geographical and family setting. Many men are alien in houses built from the traditions of their blood; the most inaccessible and obdurate parts of the earth have always been restlessly sought by individuals driven not so much by exterior pressure as by a strange necessity to inhabit a barren copper mountain, a fever coast, or follow to the end of life a river lost in a savage remoteness, hiding the secret of their unquenchable longing.

Not this, precisely, happened to me, approaching Havana in the early morning, nothing so tyrannical and absolute; yet, watching the silver greenness of Cuba rising from the blue sea, I had a premonition that what I saw was of peculiar importance to me. I grew at once impatient and sharply intent on the resolving of a nebulous, and verdant ma.s.s into the details of dense slopes, slopes that showed, from the sea to their crowns, no break in a dark foliage. The sombreness of the leaves immediately marked the land from an accustomed region of bright maples--they were at once dark, glossy, and heavy, an effect I had often tried to describe, and their presence in such utter expanses filled me with pleasure. It was exactly as though the smooth l.u.s.trous hills before me had been created out of an old mysterious desire to realize them in words.

Undoubtedly their effect belonged to the sea, the sky, and the hour in which they were set. The plane of the sea, ruffled by a wind like a willful and contrarily exerted force, was so blue that its color was lost in the dark intensity of tone; while the veils of s.p.a.ce were dissolved in arcs of expanding light. The island seemed unusually solid and isolated, as complete within itself as a flower in air, and saturated with romance. That was my immediate feeling about Cuba, taking on depth across water profounder than indigo ... it was latent with the emotional distinction which so signally stirred me to write.

At once, in imagination, I saw the ineffable bay of Guatanago, where buccaneers careened their ships and, in a town of pink stucco and windows with projecting wooden grilles, drank and took for figureheads the sacred images of churches painted blue. On the sh.o.r.e, under a canopy of silk, a woman, naked but for a twist of bishop's purple, bound her hair in gold cloth. From where she stood, in dyed shadow, a figure only less golden than the cloth, she heard the hollow ring of the caulking malls and the harsh rustle of the palms. Drawing rapidly nearer to what was evidently the entrance to the harbor of Havana I considered the possibilities of such a story, such a character:

She had her existence in the seventeenth century, when Morgan marched inland to rape Camaguey--the daughter, without doubt, of a captain of the Armada de Barlevento, the Windward Fleet, and a native woman taken in violence; a shameless wench with primitive feelings enormously complicated by the heritage of Spain's civilization, a murderous, sullen, pa.s.sionate jade, wholly treacherous and instinct with ferine curiosity. The master for her, I decided, must come from the Court of Charles, the London of the Cavalier Parliament, a gentleman in a gay foppery masking a steel eaten by a cruelty like a secret poison. It would be a story bright with the flames of h.e.l.l and violent as a hurricane; the pages would reflect the glare of the sand scrawled with cocoanut palms, and banked with mangroves; and, at the end, the bishop's purple would be a cerecloth and the gallows chains sound in Xaymaca.

But, above everything else, it would be modern in psychology and color treatment, written with that realism for which the only excuse was to provide a more exact verisimilitude for romance.

The Cuban sh.o.r.e was now so close, Havana so imminent, that I lost my story in a new interest. I could see low against the water a line of white buildings, at that distance purely cla.s.sic in implication. Then it was that I had my first premonition about the city toward which I was smoothly progressing--I was to find in it the cla.s.sic spirit not of Greece but of a late period; it was the replica of those imagined cities painted and engraved in a wealth of marble cornices and set directly against the tranquil sea. There was already perceptible about it the air of unreality that marked the strand which saw the Embarkation for Cytherea.

Nothing could have made me happier than this realization; an extension of the impression of a haunting dream turned into solid fact. The buildings multiplied to the sight, bathed in a glamorous radiance; and, suddenly, on the other hand, rose Morro Castle. That structure, small and compact and remarkably like its numerous pictures, gave me a distinct feeling of disappointment. Its importance was historic rather than visible, and needed, for appreciation, a different mind from mine.

But the narrowness of the harbor entrance, a deep thrust of blue extending crookedly into the land, the sense of crowded shipping and ma.s.sed city, the steamers of the world and broad shaded avenues at my elbow, impressed me at once with Havana's unique personality.

Nothing, however, was more ingratiating than the long coraline limestone wall of the Cabanas on its sere abrupt hill at the left; ponderous and stained brilliantly pink by time, it formed a miraculous complement to the pseudo-cla.s.sic whiteness below. A sea-wall built into a wide promenade followed the sh.o.r.e, there was a circular pavilion on a flagged plaza piled with iron chairs, the docks were interspersed with small public gardens under royal palms, and everywhere the high windows had ornamental balconies empty in the morning sun. I heard, then, the voice of Havana, a remarkably active staccato voice, never, I was to learn, sinking to quiet, but changing at night into a different yet no less disturbing clamor.

What I tried to discover, rushed through broad avenues and streets hardly more than pa.s.sageways, was the special characteristic of a city which had already possessed me. And, ignorant of the instantaneous process that formed the words, I told myself that it was a mid-Victorian Pompeii. This was a modification of my first impression, a truer approximation, for it expressed the totality of marble facades inadmissible architecturally, yet together holding a surprising and pleasant unity. No one, I thought excitedly, had ever rightly appreciated Havana; it required a very involved understanding, a feeling not entirely admirable. No, it wasn't h.e.l.lenic, not what might be called in the first manner; it hadn't the simplicity of great spirit, a true epoch; Havana was artificial, exotic: Spain touched everywhere by the tropics, the tropics--without a tradition--built into a semblance of the baroque.

It was rococo, and I liked it; an admission, I believe, laying me open to certain charges; for the rococo was universally d.a.m.ned; the Victorian period had been equally condemned ... and I liked it. Why, G.o.d knew!

Ornament without use, without reference to its surface and purpose, invited contempt. A woman in a hoop skirt was an absurdity; black walnut furniture carved and gilded beyond recognition, nonsense. Yet they had my warm attachment. Havana claimed me for its own--a city where I could sit at tables in the open and gaze at parterres of flowers and palms and statues and fountains, where, in the evening, a band played the light arias of La Belle Helene.

To ill.u.s.trate further the perversity of my impulses: I was so entirely captivated by the Hotel Inglaterra that, for the rest of the day, I was indifferent to whatever might be waiting outside. The deep entrance with its reflected planes of subdued light and servants in cool linen; the patio with water, its white arches on iridescent tiles; the dining-room laid in marble, panelled with the arms of Pontius Pilate, the bronze l.u.s.tre of the tiling and the long windows on the Parque exactly as I had antic.i.p.ated, together created the happy effect of a bizarre domain. The corridor on which my room opened was still more entrancing, its arches filled with green latticework, and an octagonal s.p.a.ce set with chairs and long-bladed plants.

Yet the room itself, perhaps one of the most remarkable rooms in the world, easily surpa.s.sed what, until then, I had seen. There were slatted door screens, cream-colored with a sapphire-blue gla.s.s k.n.o.b, topped in an elaborate Gothic scrolling; and the door beyond, inconceivably tall, opened on an interior that seemed to reach upward without any limit. It had, of course, a ceiling, heavily beamed in dark wood; and when, later, I speculated carefully on its height, I reached the conclusion that it was twenty-five feet above the grey-flowered tiling of the floor. The walls were bare, white; about their base was laid a line of green glazed tiles; and this, except for the gla.s.s above the French window, was the only positive note.

The window, too, towered with the dignity of an impressive entrance; there were two sets of shutters, the inner elaborately slatted; and over it was a semi-circular fanlight of intensely brilliant colors--carmine and orange and plum-purple, cobalt and yellow. It was extraordinarily vivid, like heaped gorgeous fruit: throughout the day it dominated the closed elusive interior; and not only from its place on high, for the sun, moving across that exposure, cast its exact replica on the floor, over the frigidity of the austere iron bed, down one wall and up another.

It was fascinating merely to sit and watch that chromatic splash, the violent color, shift with the afternoon, to surrender the mind to its suggestions.... They, as well, were singularly bright and illogical.

Such gla.s.s, such colors, had been discarded from present decorative schemes; but I recalled hints of them in the houses of eighteen seventy; I seemed to remember them in paG.o.da-like conservatories, and at once a memory of my childhood returned. Not that there were, actually, such windows at Woodnest, sombre under the tulip-poplars; yet the impression of one re-created the feeling of the other, it brought back disturbingly a vanished time with its figures long dead.

Havana was identified as an authentic part of my inheritance. I was--in a purely inner manner--to understand it, to have for it the affectionate recognition, the sense of familiarity, of which I have already spoken.

The city was wholly expressed by the fanlight sparkling with the shifting radiance of the blazing day. It was possible, without leaving the room, to grasp the essential spirit of a place so largely unseen.

Then it occurred to me that, indeed, I had seen Havana, and that the wisest thing to do was to leave at once, to go back with my strong feeling uncontaminated by trivial facts; but a more commonplace impulse, a limiting materialism, pointed out that, since I had come away for a change of scene, I had best realize a semblance of my intention. Still those colors, like a bouquet of translucent tulips, easily outweighed in importance all that I subsequently gained; they gave the emotional pitch, the intellectual note, of whatever followed--a mood, an entire existence, into which I walked with the turning of a sapphire-blue k.n.o.b.

For the rest the furniture was scant--a walnut bureau with a long mirror, necessary chairs, and an adequate bathroom like a shaft with shining silver faucets at its bottom. From outside, even through the heat of noon, the sustained activity of sound floated up through the shutters--the incomplete blending of harsh traffic alarms and blurred cries announcing newspapers.

It was later when I went out on my balcony: across the narrow depth of San Rafael Street the ornamented bulk of the Gallego Club--the Club and the opera house in one--opposed a corner against the sweep of the Parque Central; and to the right, between the glitter of shop windows, poured an unbroken procession of motors. A great pillar of the pas...o...b..low was hung with gaily covered magazines; a bootblack, wrinkled and active, with a single chair on a high stand, was cleaning a row of white shoes, obviously from the hotel; and the newsboys were calling La Politica Comica in a long-drawn minor inflection.

The sun, that I had seen rising on the undiscovered hills of Cuba, was sinking behind the apprehended city; it touched the caryatids of the Gallego Club and enveloped, in a diminished gold like a fine suffusion of precious dust, the circular avenue, the royal palms, the flambeau trees and Indian laurels, of the plaza. The whiteness of the buildings, practically unbroken, everywhere took on the tone of every moment: now they were faintly aureate, as though they had been lightly touched by a gilder's brush; the diffused shadows were violet. The shadows slowly thickened and merged; they seemed to swell upward from the streets, the Parque; and the buildings, in turn, became lavender, and then, again, a glimmering white. Only the lifted green of the palms was changeless, positive, until it was lost in darkness.

A great many people appeared below, moving with an air of determination on definite ways. The faces of the men were darkened by the contrast of their linen; I couldn't see their features; but what struck me at once was the fact that there were, practically, no women along the streets.

It was a tide of men. This, at first, gave me an impression of monotony, of stupidity--women were an absolute essential to the variety of any spectacle; and here, except for an occasional family group hurrying to a cafe, a rare stolid shape, they were utterly lacking.

The reason, however, quickly followed the observed truth; this was, in spirit, Spain, and Spain was saturated with Morocco, a land where women, even the poorest, were never publicly exhibited. Havana was a city of balconies, of barred windows, of houses impenetrable, blank, to the streets, but open on the garden rooms of patios. And suddenly--while the moment before I had been impatient at the bareness resulting from their absence--I was overwhelmingly conscious of the pervading influence of charming women. Here they were infinitely more appealing than in places where they were set out in the rows of a market, sometimes like flowers, but more often resembling turnips and squashes. Here, with extreme flattery, women were regarded as dangerous, as always desirable, and capable of folly.

It was a society where a camellia caught in the hair, a brilliant glance across a powdered cheek, lace drawn over a vivid mouth, were not for nothing. In the world from which I had come these gestures, beauties, existed; but they were general, and meaningless, rather than special--the expression of a conventional vanity without warmth. There was an agreement that any one might look, the intensest gaze was invited, with the understanding that almost none should desire; and a cloak of hypocrisy had been the result; either that or the beauty was mechanical, the gesture furtive and hard.

For Havana a woman was, in principle, a flower with delicate petals easily scattered, a perfume not to be rudely, indiscriminately, spent; a rose, it was the implication, had its moment, its perfection of eager flushed loveliness, during which what man would not reach out his hand?

After that ... but the seed pods were carefully, jealously, tended. And here, in addition to so much else, was another shared att.i.tude drawing me toward Havana--an enormous preference for women who had the courage of their emotions over those completely circ.u.mspect except in situations morally and financially solid.

My dressing for dinner I delayed luxuriously, smoking the last Dimitrino cigarette found in a pocket, and leaving the wet prints of my feet on the polished tiles of the floor. I was glad that I had brought a trunk, variously filled, in place of merely a bag, as I might have done; for it was evident that Havana required many changes of clothes. It was a city which to enjoy demanded a meticulous attention to trifles. For one thing it was going to be hot, April was well advanced; and the glorietas, the brightly illuminated open cafes, the thronged Prado and operatic Malecon, the general air of tropical expensiveness, insisted on the ornamental fitness of its idlers.

I debated comfortably the security of a dinner coat, slightly varied, perhaps, by white flannels; but in the end decided in favor of a more informal jacket of Chinese silk with the flannels. A shirt, the socks and scarf, were objects of separate importance; but when they were combined there was a prevailing shade of green.... I had no inclination to apologize for lingering over these details, but it might be necessary to warn the seekers after n.o.ble truisms that I had no part in their righteous purpose. Even n.o.ble truths, in their popular definitions, had never been a part of my concern: at the beginning I was hopelessly removed from them, and what was an instinct had become, in an experience of life not without supporting evidence, the firmest possible att.i.tude.

A tone of candor, if my reflections were to have the slightest interest or value, was my first necessity; and candor compelled me to admit that I thought seriously about the jacket which finally slipped smoothly over my shoulders.

It was an undeniable fact that I was newly in a land of enormous interest, which, just then, held the most significant and valuable crop growing on earth. But that didn't detain my imagination for a moment.

The Havana that delighted me, into which I found myself so happily projected, was a city of promenading and posted theatre programmes, of dinners and drinks and fragrant cigars. I was aware that from such things I might, in the end, profit; but I'd get nothing, nothing in the world, from stereotyped sentiments and places and solemn gabbled information.

On top of this I had a fixed belief in the actual importance of, say, a necktie--for myself of course; I was not referring to the neckties of the novelists with a mission, lost in the dilemma of elevating mankind.

A black string, or none at all, served their superiority. But for the light-minded the claim of a Bombay foulard against the solider shade of an Irish poplin was a delicate question; for the light-minded the choice of one word in preference to another--entirely beneath the plane of a mission--was a business for blood, an overt act. And with me there was a correspondence between the two, a personal exterior as nicely selected as possible and the mental att.i.tude capable of exquisite choice in diction. But this was no more than a development of all that I first admitted, a repet.i.tion of my pleasure at being in Havana, a place where the election of a c.o.c.ktail was invested with gravity. And, carefully finished except for the flower I'd get below, I was entirely in harmony with the envelopment, the adventure, to which my persistent good luck had brought me.

The elevator going down was burdened with expensive women, their bodies delicately evident under clinging fragile materials, their powdered throats hung with the clotted iridescence of pearls; the cage was filled with soft breathing and faint provocative perfumes--the special lure of flowers which nature had denied to them as women. It was, I told myself, all very reprehensible and delightful:

Here were creatures, anatomically planned for the sole end of maternity, who had wilfully, wisely I felt, elevated the mere preliminary of their purpose to the position of its whole consummation. More intoxicated by sheer charm than by the bearing of children, resentful of the thickened ankles of their immemorial duty, they proclaimed by every enhanced and seductive curve that their intention was magnetic rather than economic.

They were, however, women of my own land, secure in that convention which permitted them exposure with immunity, and here; in Havana, they failed to interest me; their voices, too, were sharp, irritable; and even in the contracted s.p.a.ce of the elevator their elaborate backs were so brutally turned on the men with them--men correct enough except for their studs--the hard feminine tyranny of the chivalrous United States was so starkly upheld, that I escaped with a sigh of relief into a totally different atmosphere.

The lower hall, the patio and dining-room on the left, were brilliant with life, the wing-like flutter of fans; and it would be necessary, I saw, to have my c.o.c.ktail in the patio; but before that, following a purely instinctive course, I walked out to the paseo in front of the hotel. The white buildings beyond the dark foliage of the Parque were coruscant with electric signs, and, their utilitarian purpose masked in an unfamiliar language, they shared with the alabaster of the facades, the high fronds of the royal palms and the monument to Marti, in the tropical, the cla.s.sic, romanticism.

Hardly had I appeared, gazing down the illuminated arcade, when a man approached me with a flat wide basket of flowers. There were, inevitably, roses, tea roses as pale as the yellow of champagne, gardenias, so smooth and white that they seemed unreal, heavy with odor; those I had expected, but what surprised me were some sprigs of orange blossom with an indefinite sweetness that was yet perceptible above the thicker scents. I chose the latter immediately, and the flower vendor, wholly comprehensive of my mood, placed the boutonniere in my jacket. The moment, now, had arrived for a Daiquiri: seated near the cool drip of the fountain, where a slight stir of air seemed to ruffle the fringed mantone of a bronze dancing Andalusian girl, I lingered over the frigid mixture of Ron Bacardi, sugar, and a fresh vivid green lime.

It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was to discover later at the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be sitting, at that hour in the Inglaterra, with such a drink. It elevated my contentment to an even higher pitch; and, with a detached amus.e.m.e.nt, I recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was formally in effect. Unquestionably the c.o.c.ktail on my table was a dangerous agent, for it held, in its shallow gla.s.s bowl slightly encrusted with undissolved sugar, the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it set the mind free of responsibility; obliterating both memory and to-morrow, it gave the heart an advent.i.tious feeling of superiority and momentarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal, fears.

Yes, that was the danger of skilfully prepared intoxicating drinks....

The word intoxicating adequately expressed their power, their menace to orderly monotonous resignation. A word, I thought further, debased by moralists from its primary ecstatic content. Intoxication with Ron Bacardi, with May, with pa.s.sion, 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 b.u.t.tonhole, 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 a.s.set 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 pa.s.sionate interest in living, the sense of aesthetic 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. Pa.s.sersby 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 Cabanas 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 l.u.s.trous 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.