San Cristobal de la Habana Part 6

The failure as a painter was serious, but I had never had the least interest in those qualities included in the term a good citizen. I knew nothing about the government of the United States, and made no effort to find out; as an abstraction it had reality for me, but as a reality no substance. The priceless right of vote I neglected for whoever it was in the Republican machine that regularly discharged that responsibility for me. All that interested me, that I deeply cared for, was first the disposal of paint on stretched canvas and then the arrangement of words with a probable meaning and possible beauty.

An extremely bad period, that, when I tried to write without knowledge or support, reaching from twenty until well after thirty, when I managed to sell a sc.r.a.p of prose. From then until forty the time had gone in a flash, a scratching of the pen: it seemed incredible that the seven books on a shelf bearing my name had been the result of so brief, so immaterial, a time. Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba, gazing peacefully into the dim expensive s.p.a.ce of a room in the Hotel Inglaterra, congratulating myself on the loss, the positive lapse, of what was called men's most valuable possession.

No better place for the trying of my sincerity than Havana existed; no other city in the world could so perfectly create the illusion of complete irresponsibility, of happiness followed for its own sake, as an end, or as the means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and plazas and promenades, its alternating sparkle and languor, like flags whipping in the wind or drooping about their staffs, always conveyed a spirit of holiday and of a whole absence of splenetic censure. At the bottom of this the climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days and nights stirring with a breeze through the galleries, concentrated the mind and body on pleasure.

Night had always been the time for gaiety, when the practical was veiled in shade; and Havana responded with an inimitable grace to the stars.

It was constructed for night, like a lunar park of marble and palms and open flooding radiance; with, against that, streets packed with darkness and doors of mystery to which clung the faint breath of patchouli. The air was instinct with seduction, faintly touched by the pungency of Ron Bacardi and limes, and bland with the vapors of delightful cigars. The clothes, too--the white linens and flannels and silks of the men; the ruffled dresses on the balconies, the flowery laces, like white carnations, in the automobiles; the wide hats of Paris and the satin slippers tied about the ankles, with preposterous heels; the fluttering fans--all, all were in the key of light sharp emotion, of challenge and invitation and surrender.

Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana, any philosophy in the face of that charm, was unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a farther development of this, tacitly left to my own devices and thoughts, as if there were a general perception of my remoteness from the affair in hand. I was suffered to come and go without notice; no one, much, spoke to me; even those not unaware of the possibility of a book, of San Cristobal de la Habana, in which their city would find praise, were hardly stirred to interest. The moment to go to Havana was youth, the moment for masked b.a.l.l.s and infidelity and champagne: its potency for me lay in its investment of memories; I regarded it as a spectacle set in the tropics. I was an onlooker and not a partic.i.p.ant. But I had, as I have shown, no regret; I had become reconciled not only to the fleetness of time, but equally to the fact that my role was necessarily a spectator's. Hour after hour, year after year, I sat writing at the low window which looked out over my green terrace and clipped hedge, to the road, to life, beyond.

Above everything, then, I was satisfied with the Havana I knew. From the standpoint of actuality my comprehension was limited--I was familiar with only a certain narrow part of the city, for it was my habit to go back to what I had found rather than discover the new--perhaps ten streets and a handful of houses, parks, and cafes. Too much to get into a score of books. What I had lost, I thought further--if, indeed, I had ever possessed it--was a warm personal contact such as I should have had dancing with a lovely girl. I never danced, but remained outside, philosophically, gazing at the long bright whirling rectangles.

At the Inglaterra there were many men older than myself who danced persistently and had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too, wore flowers in their coats, but aggressive and not reminiscent blooms. They formed most of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't much youth among them, but I didn't envy them in the slightest. They were, if possible, more absurd than the women unmindful of thickening waists and dulled eyes. Their ardor was febrile and their power money; and every time they escorted with a quickened step their charmers past young dark men, the charmers glanced back appealingly. It was different with the Cubans, who regarded such things more naturally, and did not, practically, in consequence, get drunk.

The noise from San Rafael Street never slackened, the clamor of the mule-drivers and the emptying cans of refuse took the place of the motor signals; the slats of my lowered shutters showed streaks of dawn. I turned once, it appeared, and the room was filled with indirect sunlight, the hands of my watch were at ten. It was eleven before I was dressed, with the morning cup of black coffee empty on a table; at twelve I had breakfast, and until five I idly read. The evening as well was idle--a thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvious and active standards. I thought, with no impulse to return, of the house near the a.r.s.enal, which had, in effect, been open for centuries and which, unless life were purified, would never close. The purity I meant was not a limitation of pa.s.sion, but its release from obscene confines. It didn't matter what I meant and, again, I was becoming too serious ... or not serious about the correct things. There was perpetually the danger of being overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early flight, by the influences, the promptings, of my heredity and strong first a.s.sociations. What an amazing climax to my records of chiffon textures and moods of chiffon that would be: shouting the creed of a bitter Scots induration from the informal pulpits of the streets! Or I might publish, to the dismay of every one intimately concerned, a denunciatory sermonizing book. But what the subject was wouldn't matter, as it had not mattered with Jeremy Taylor, if it were written with sufficient beauty. Disagreeable books, too, in spite of the accepted contrary belief, were always very highly esteemed.

It was easy enough to account for Jeremy Taylor by the vague generalization of beauty, and I forced myself to a closer scrutiny of that term and my meaning. The words beauty and love, and a dozen others, like old shoes, had grown so shapeless through long mis-wear that they would stay on no foot. I tried to isolate some quality indisputably recognizable as beautiful and hit, to my surprise, on intellectual courage. The thought of an undeviating mental integrity was as exhilarating as the crash of ma.s.sed marching bands. Then, searching for another example, I recalled August nights at Dower House, with the moonlight lying like water between the black shadows of the trees on the lawn. There was a harsh interwoven shrilling of locusts and the echo--almost the feel rather than the sound--of thunder below the horizon. This, too, stirred me profoundly, brought about the glow trans.m.u.table into creative effort.

Another excursion found nothing but a boy and a girl, any boy and any girl, fired by shy uncomplicated pa.s.sion.... A mental, a visual, and a natural incentive, each with the same effect, the identical pinching of the heart and thrust to a common hidden center. What had they each alike? Perhaps it was this: that they were the three great facts of existence, the primary earth, the act of creation, and the crowning dignity, the superiority of men who, somehow, had transvalued the sum of their awarded clay. Somehow! I had no intention of examining that. The fact was, for me, enough.

There was, however, another phase of beauty still, one peculiarly the property of novelists, which had to do not with life at all, but with death, with vain longing and memories and failure. All the novels which seemed to me of the first rank were constructed from these latter qualities; and while painting and music and lyrical poetry were affirmative, the novel was negative, built, where it was great, from great indignations. Yet, while this was obvious truth, it failed to include or satisfy me; for there were many pa.s.sages not recognizable as great in the broadest sense, both in literature and life, that filled me with supreme pleasure--there were pages of Turgenev spun out of the fragile melancholy of a girl, a girl with a soul in dusk, far more enthralling than, for example, Thomas Hardy. It may have been that there was the perception of a similitude between Turgenev's figure and myself; certainly I was closer to her mood, her disease of modernity, than to a sheep herder; and there was a possibility, for my own support, that the finest-drawn sensibilities, not regarded as emotions in the grand key, would turn out to be our most highly justified preoccupation.

I was, at present, in Havana, submerged in its fascination, and when I came to write about it there would not be lacking those to say that I had been better occupied with simpler things. Hugh Walpole had warned me of the danger, to me, of parquetry and vermilion Chinese Chippendale; and I was certain that he would speak to me again in the same tone about idling in a mid-Victorian Pompeii, celebrating drink and marble touched by the gilder's brush of late afternoon. Perhaps Walpole--and Henry Mencken's keen friendly discernment--was right; but, d.a.m.n it, my experience was deficient in material essentials; I was dangerously ignorant of current reality, and I doubted if my style was a suitable instrument for rugged facts.

What remained for me, an accomplishment s.p.a.cious enough for anyone, was the effort to realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the face of imminent destruction. And in that category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, so soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly. The thought of such a woman, the essence, the distillation, of an art of life superimposed on sheer economy, was more moving to me than the most heroic maternity. I couldn't get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge.

The setting of a woman in a dress by Cheruit; a part of the bravery of fragile soft paste Lowestoft china and square emeralds that would feed a starving village, on fingers that had done no more than wave a fan; the fan itself, on gold and ivory with ta.s.selled silk--the things to which the longing of men, elevated a degree above hard circ.u.mstances, turned--were of equal weight with the whole; for it was not what the woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter.

This, however wide apart it may seem, was closely bound to my presence in Havana, to my delight and purpose there. It was nothing more than a statement, a development, if not a final vindication, of my instant sense of pleasure and familiarity--a place already alive in my imagination. My special difficulty was the casting of it into a recognizable, adequate medium. There, in the plaiting of cobwebs instead of hemp rope, I particularly invited disaster. It wasn't necessary that I should sustain anyone, but only that I should spread the illusion of the buried a.s.sociations and image of a brain. That, if it were true, I held, would be beauty.

Here, at least, I was serious about the correct things, direct rather than conventional; all that mattered was the spreading of the illusion, the spectacle of what part of Havana I did know interpreted, realized, not in the spirit of an architectural plan, but as sentient with reflected emotions. Otherwise the most weighty charges against me were absolutely justified. If I couldn't make Havana respond in the key of my intrinsic feelings, if I had no authentic feeling with which to invest it, my book, almost all my books, were a weariness and a mistake.

Novels of indignation or of melancholy, of a longing for the continuity of individual pa.s.sion confronted with the inevitable--it was that, the perishability of all that was desirable, which gave to small things, a flower in the hair, their importance as symbols. The love story, once the exclusive province of fiction, had disappeared; it was now practically impossible for the slightest talent to fill a book in that manner. The romantic figment, like a confection of spun sugar with a sprig of artificial orange blossoms, had been discarded; the beauty of love, it had been discovered, wasn't the possession of a particular heart, but the tenderness, the pity, that came from the realization of its inescapable loss. No man could love a woman, no woman could love a man, who was to live forever; a thousand years would be an insuperable burden. The higher a cultivation, a delight, reached, the more tragic was its breaking by death; the greater knowledge a mind held, the more humiliating was the illimitable ignorance, the profound night pressing in upon every feeble and temporary human lamp.

Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write, were composed, now, not so much from among the bra.s.ses, the tympani, as from the violins. The great majority, like the great books, were dedicated to the primary chords; but my reaching the former had been always hopeless. I didn't mind this, for I told myself that, while the structure of approbation I had gathered was comparatively modest, its stones and masonry were admirable; it was, if not a mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on earth--what was in England called, I believe, a freehold. It was mine, and there was no lease dependent on the good will--or on my subserviency--of any landlord.

Most of this went through my mind as I sat looking at my trunk, open on end in an alcove near the door, for I was gathering my clothes and thoughts in preparation for leaving Havana. One thing only that I wished to see now remained--the danzon at the National Theatre. I kept out a dark suit, one that would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's box; for I had been told that it was desirable to avoid unnecessary attention. There was, briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted--I had heard the same thing so often before without subsequent justification--but I could believe it possible if there was any violent discharge of primitive emotion. Here the spirit of Africa burned remote and pale, but it was still a tropical incomprehensible flame.

A strip of red carpet led from the outer steps, across a large promenade, to the circular wall of the theatre; and though it was past eleven, the ball hadn't yet a.s.sumed an appearance of life. But just within the entrance a negro band began suddenly to play, and in the music alone I immediately found the potent actuality of danger. I was without the knowledge necessary to the disentangling of its elements: there were fiddles and horns and unnatural kettle drums, and an instrument made from a long gourd, with a parallel scoring for the sc.r.a.pe of a stick. The music was first a shock, then an exasperation hardly to be borne, but finally it a.s.sumed a rhythm maddening beyond measure.

It was Africa and something else--notes taken from the Moors, splitting quavers of Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that might have been the agonized voice of the first Cubenos; with an unspeakable distortion, a crazy adaptation, of sc.r.a.ps of to-day. There was no pause, no beginning or end, in its form; it went on and on and on, rising and falling, fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and then a blasting discord--the savage naked utterance of a naked savage l.u.s.t; it was a music not of pa.s.sion, but of the frenzy of rape. Nothing like it would have been possible in writing, allowed in painting; only music was free to express, to sound, such depths. Nothing but music could have conveyed the inarticulate cries of the stirred mire that flooded the marble s.p.a.ce of the opera house. It had lost the simplicity of its appropriate years, the spring orgies in the clearings of early forests; time had made it hideously menacing, cynical, and corrupt.

At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro woman with a wheedling tainted manner tried to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger and pale, their faces coated with rice powder, went past in dragging satins. They were chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened cheeks and dead-looking mat-like hair, their coffee-colored b.r.e.a.s.t.s and white kid gloves, gave them an extraordinary incongruity; and behind them, as sharp as the whisper of their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered.

Leaning forward on the rail of my enclosure, I gazed down over the floored expanse of the auditorium:

The stage was set with the backdrop and wings of a conventional operatic design--a scene that would have served equally Ada or La Favorita: it towered, like a faded dream of pseudo-cla.s.sic Havana, into the theatrical heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and charcoal grey, of loggias and peristyles and fountains; while in close order about its three sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live border of dancers.

They were of every color from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster, to utter blackness. The men, for the most part, were light, some purely Spanish, the negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I could see no indisputably white women. There was a girl in a mantone of bright contrasting colors, a high comb and a rose in her hair, about whom there was a question. However, her partner was one of the few full negroes there; and, as they revolved below my box, it seemed that her skin had a leaden cast.

The danzon itself had, at first, the appearance of a sustained gravity: it was danced slowly, in very small s.p.a.ce, following the music with arbitrary reverses, and pausing. There might have been, to the superficial view, a restraint almost approaching dignity had the dancers been other. The men, without exception, wore their stiff straw hats and smoked cigars through every evolution; and the dresses, the dressing, of the women were fantastic: a small wasted girl, dryly black, had copied the color and petals of a sunflower. As she revolved, her skirt flared out from legs like bent bones, and a hat of raw yellow flapped across her grotesque ebony countenance.

The danzon, for a moment, in spite of the music played continuously and alternately by two orchestras occupying a box on either side of the stage, seemed formal. Then, abruptly, a couple lost every restraint, and their maddened spinning and furious hips tore the illusion to shreds.

And slowly I began to be conscious of a poisonous air, a fetid air as palpable as the odors and scents--the breath, the premonition, of the danger of which I had been warned. It lay in an ugly hysteria of rasped emotions that at any illogical accident might burst into the shrillness of a knife. It wasn't dangerous so much as it was abjectly wicked--the deliberate calling up of sooty shapes that had better be kept buried. It was unimportant that the men below me were, in the daytime, commonplace clerks; the women could be anything chance had made them: here, to the spoiled magic of Carabalie nights, they were evoking a ceremonial of horror.

Personally, since I had no hopes to save or plans to protect, I hadn't the desire, like Sampson, to pull down the pillars of the roof on their debased heads. I enjoyed it remarkably; the more because I saw, scattered among the crowd, figures of unreal and detrimental beauty--a creamy magnificence in creamy satin with a silver band on her forehead; a yellow creature with oblique eyes in twenty white flounces and a natural garland of purple flowers; a thing of ink, of basalt carved by an opulent chisel, on whose body clothes were incidental; and corrupt graces perfect in youth and figure weaving the patterns, the wisdom, of Sodom.

One o'clock pa.s.sed, then two and three, but there was no abatement in the danzon. A middle-aged man, with an abstracted air, danced without stopping for an hour and fifty minutes. His partner, flushing through her dark skin, was expensively habited: her fingers and throat glittered coldly with diamonds and her hat was swept with long dipping plumes. She had a malignant mouth and eyes a thick muddy brown, and it was clear that she hated the man in whose arms she was turning. I wondered about her hatred and the patience, the indifference, of the other: how revolting she would be in a few hours, livid and ghastly in the morning.

He, probably, would then be standing at a high desk, counting dollars with integrity or adding columns of figures, precise and respectable in an alpaca coat. An older man still was dancing by himself, intent on the intricate stepping of his own feet. His agility soon won an admiring circle, and his violence increased with the applause: he jumped in the air, clapping his heels together, and his arms waved wildly--a marionette pulled convulsively by wires in strange merciless hands.

I imagined a fetish, a large G.o.d, on the stage, drooping over his swollen belly, with a hanging lip and hands set in his loins. His legs were folded, lost in flesh ... a squatting smeared trunk of hideous service. Around him were the seated rows of worshippers, on either hand was his jangling praise; and before him revolved the dancers in his rite. The music throbbed in my brain like a madness that would have dragged me down to the floor. I speculated fleetly over such a surrender, the drop, through countless ages, of that possible descent.

It was, however, only just to add that the idol of Guinea suffered unduly from his surroundings and the age in which he was exposed; in his place, his time, he had been neither a monster nor unnatural, but nothing more than the current form of worship. He, Bongo, had had the misfortune to be catapulted, together with his congregation, through twenty, forty, centuries, in a breath, on the magic carpet of greed, and put down in a day where he was not only obsolete, but repudiated. Men saw him with the sense of horror generated by a blasting view of their own very much earlier selves. For the difference between the negro, the Carabalies, or Macua, and the Spaniards of the sixteenth century in Cuba was, at heart, historical in time only. They were members--we were all members--of one family. The innocence of a bare black, torn like a creeper from the support of his native tree, tatooed with necessary charms, medicines, against jungle fears and fevers, had more to dread from Amador de Lares than any later Christians owed to an arbitrarily imported savagery. What, in reality, occurred, was implied on the wide floor of the opera house, was that the negroes, unable to change their simplicity as easily as they superficially diluted their skins, kept their innocent habits, their tastes in noise and religion and misconduct; but, in the dress of civilization, these took on the aspect of a grotesque defiled horror. With this, too, in an earnest effort to a.s.similate as much as possible of their enforced land, they caught such bright fragments of life as struck them--the gla.s.s beads and bits of gay cloth--and copied them prodigiously. The confusion which followed was a tragedy in the comic spirit--a discordant mingling that provoked laughter, quickly stopped by a deeper understanding and by pity. The past vital still: with the entrance of the African slave into the West, it was exactly as though a figure in the paint and feathers of voodoo had been thrust into a polite salon.

The spectacle had none of the comfortable features of a mere exhibition; for the revulsion came from a spiritual shudder in the beings of the onlookers; while the other injured individuals saw that, as clothes, the crude partial imitation of a rooster was insufficient. They, the latter, commendably hurried into trousers and pot hats, into satin trains and pink tulle and white kid gloves; but the transition was too hurried, too optimistic, and the resulting incongruity ... I was not a student of ethnology, I had no theory of races, but, gazing down from my box, it seemed to me that yesterday could not be instantly combined with to-day; it was evident that there was no short way by a long and painful business of evolution.

Nothing more unfortunate could well be imagined; for, in the retributive manner I had already mentioned, the Africa buried in the West, so long forgotten, took life again, and the danger to everyone had been acute through a long period of Havana's years. We, in temperate zones, in weathers that had no need of the protection of a special dark pigment, had been lucky; but we were trying our luck very severely by subjecting it to the old potencies not yet entirely lost. The danzon was, actually, in a way beyond legislation, a masked ball in black and white, where the unmasking was involuntary and fateful.

One, I thought, spoiled the other, like an incomplete experiment in chemistry where nothing but an opaque liquid and an intolerable stench was evolved. Perhaps, with acute necessity, a successful clear result would reward the future with peace; but it wouldn't happen in my knowledge; I hadn't a thing in the world to do with it. What occurred to me then was the useful fact that the present scene afforded the right, the only, ending for my story, The Bright Shawl. It would have to be tragic, but only indirectly; nothing, I had decided, should happen to my princ.i.p.al character beyond a young moment of supreme romance. No, the mishap, death, must envelop his friend, the patriotic Cuban. He'd be killed by a Spanish officer, through a woman--a woman in the bright shawl of the dancer that had been preserved as a memento of tender regard.

Some arrangement was necessary, perhaps a prost.i.tute. Well--I had seen her, in virginal white muslin, with the weight of her head, its oval flattened by the hand of China, her heavy hair, inclined on its slender neck: a figure, in my pages, impa.s.sively fateful, remote as I had seen her seated in a gay company. That finished the story, for the youthful American, after a vain public effort to secure for himself the dignity of a heroic end, would be ignominiously deported from Cuba. I had been often asked how I arrived at my plots, but more often accused of never reaching an intelligible plan, and, until now, I'd been incapable of giving an explanation satisfactory even to myself; but here was one accounted for to a considerable degree. It had begun by an instinctive attachment to a city, to Havana; and the emotions brought into being had crystallized into a plan, for me, unusually concise.

There was a temptation, to be avoided, to tell it in the first person; a version that had come to be disliked almost as universally as a set of letters. Some celebrated stories had been written that way--Youth--but I felt that it was an unnecessary charge on sympathy. While the creation of character was no longer the tyrant it had been, a certain air of veracity was most desirable, and the limited scope of a single intelligence discussing, explaining, himself was too marked. The great trouble with the romantic novels up to the very present had been that there was never a doubt of the ultimate happiness of all who should be happy and the overwhelming misery of those who should be miserable. No peril was the father of a thrill, because from its inception it was plainly impotent to harm the lovely and the brave. The pleasure had from witnessing a dexterous job was lost in an artifice that seldom approached an art. But we'd improved that, an improvement expressed in the utter loss of the word hero; no man, or woman, was now entirely safe in the hands of his romantic author; the two manners had come creditably together.

I had become, subconsciously, interested in a girl pausing on the floor, and, in response to my scrutiny, she glanced up with a shadowy smile. I gazed with instant celerity and fixedness at the ceiling, then at the upper boxes opposite, since below, indiscretion was laid like a trail of powder, of explosive rice powder. There was no cutting in at that ball.

She was more than charming, too, with her mixed blood evident in her carriage, her indolence, rather than in feature. She wore blue, a wisely simple dress that showed small feet, like b.u.t.terflies in their lightness, and the instinctive note of a narrow black velvet band on her throat.

An air of sadness rested on her, on, princ.i.p.ally, a superiority anyone could see. Her fan opened and shut in a thin pointed hand. A maid, I told myself, reflecting the aristocracy of the closets of delicate clothes in her charge, scented from the gold-stoppered bottles of her mistress. She was another phase of what had been going on at such length through my mind--a different catastrophe, since she was denied the reward of the virtues in either of the races that had made her. In Boston she would have become a bluestocking, a poet singing in minor cadence to traditional abolitionists become dilettantes, but in Cuba, tormented by the strains of the danzon:

There, her flax burning in resentment and despair, she might be extinguished in the tide restlessly sweeping to the troubled coast of Birrajos: or, at Havana, carried into the secrets of the nanigos: in the black cabildo of that society, provision was made for a woman.

It was significant that the first organization of naniguismo in Cuba was purely African, for the hatred of its members, Carabalies, for the white race made the admission of even mulattos impossible. This society--tierra or juego--was formed during the administration of General Tacon, in the village of Regla, and called Apapa Efi. It was, against the protests of its originators at sharing the secret with too many, enlarged, and spread through the outskirts of Havana. There the mulattos greatly outnumbered the blacks, and they formed a society of their own, its oath sworn in Ancha del Norte Street, named Ecobio Efo Macarara. They insisted on a common brotherhood and their right of entering the fambas, the ceremonial rooms; but there was a determined opposition, open battle and murder in Perserverancia and Lagunas Streets. After this there was a general meeting at Marianao, the early bar to color, as distinguished from black, removed, and the infusion of the dark ritual of Efi into white blood began. When, ten years after, an indiscriminate society, the Ecobio Efo, was terminated by the authorities, Spanish n.o.bles and professional men were a.s.sisting in the rites.

What had started upon the African river Oldan as a tribal religion took on, in Havana, a debased version of Rome, and the veneration of Santa Barbara was added to the supreme worship of Ecue, a figure vaguely parallel to the Holy Ghost, created in the sounding of a sacred drum.

And what, equally, in the Carabalie Bricamo was Dibo, G.o.d, became in Cuba an organization of criminals and finally, when its more obvious aspects were stamped out, a corrupt political influence. There, in the clearest possible manner, was traced the eventual effect of so much heralded superiority, such enormous advantages, on native belief.

There could be no doubt, though, of the fact that, in any pretence of civilization, the nanigos were detrimental; it was unavoidable that they should have degenerated into a savage menace, not only in overt acts, which were not lacking, but in practices of mental and emotional horror.

Their ceremony, with its strange vocables and distortions of meaning; the obscene words that were but symbols for obscenities beyond imagination; the character of their dance, which gave them the name arrastrados, men who dragged themselves, reptilian, on the ground--all combined in a poison like a gas sweeping from the mora.s.s of the past. It held, beneath its refuge and defiance of society, the appeal of a portentous secret, bound in blood, the fascination, the fetishism, of orgiastic rituals, and, under that, stronger still, delirious barbarity.

Its legend was not different from the others which formed the primitive bases of subsequent elaborate beliefs: the miracle, with an attending baptism, was consummated by a woman, Sicanecua, who found a crying fish--the fish was a sacred Christian sign--in her jar of water. In recognition of this she was sacrificed and her blood put to a holy use, and the fish skinned for the drum, sounded by the fingers, used in his praise. Here Ecue, the divine, was baptized by Efo in the Oldan, who in turn signed his disciple. And about that tradition, guarded--with its instrument--in the altar, Ecue sese, the degenerate elements and characters of modern naniguismo gathered. There were, necessarily, changes in the Cuban form of worship--the skin of a goat was subst.i.tuted for the unprocurable variety of fish, and the timbre of the original drum secured by an artifice. The need, as well, of finding another anointment than human blood, difficult to procure in Havana, led to the sacrifice of the rooster or a goat. This, now, had a crucifix, with the profession that G.o.d, Dibo, must be over everything, and a sacramental singing; but not the Te Deum or Laudes ... Efore sisi llamba, and the reply Ho Isueribo engomo ... Mocongo! while the Empego, the clerk of the service, shifted brightly colored curtains and enveloping handkerchiefs and marked with yellow chalk the head and body and palms of the initiates.

A diablito had in charge the offices of the catechism--Come with me; where did you leave your feet; where I left my head! Enter where Bongo is and cry with your brother! Look at your brother because they want to choke him. He conducted the sacrifice of the goat, which, in a memorial of Guinea, was eaten with pointed sticks, with the drink Mucuba, made from sugar-cane rum and bitter broom. A strange procession followed, led by the Insue, with a woman in a shift, Sicanecue, and the diablito skipping backward. The sese, a silver crucifix with four black feathers, was carried, and later the remains of the feast were thrown into a cemetery.