San Cristobal de la Habana Part 7

The effort to end naniguismo in Havana began in eighteen hundred and seventy-five, when its gatherings were forbidden; but, deeply traditional, it flourished in hidden places, in the jail where nanigos were confined and the cellars of Jesus Maria. Long before that the poet Placido had been killed; within a few years the Llamba named Hand on the Ground was judicially executed; and following the a.s.sa.s.sinations during the carnival of eighteen hundred and sixty-five, sweeping deportations were enforced. In Maloja Street a juego, Acaniran Efo Primero, with officers drawn from reputable quarters, was surprised; the next year the Abacua Efo was exterminated; a public clash of diablitos resulted in apprehensions; and twenty-five nanigos were taken on Vista Hermosa Street.

It was, in reality, Africa in Havana, brought against its wish and to its tragic misfortune; and, planted in an alien soil, but among a common genus, the mysteries of religion, it grew into an aberration of all that gave it birth. Aside from this, its significance, for me, lay in its amazing language, an idiom, specifically, composed of the Carabalie Bricamo and a Spanish without articles or conjunctions, equally incapable of exact images and the expression of abstract thought. But taking the place of its omissions, was a congealing power of suggestion, of creating, through, apparently, no more than the jumbling of common terms and sounds, sensations of abject dread. The four bishops of the ritual, in their order, were Insue, Illamba, Mocongo, Empego. In naniguismo man was momban, an idiot was sansguere, a knife icua rebesine, a pistol etombre, immortality embigui, the night erufie, war ochangana, the sun fanson, and worms cocorico. The language took short rigid forms, phrases; it had little if any plasticity: Amandido amanllurube, The day goes and the night comes. Efiquefi que buton efique Ename onton Ellego Efimeremo Iboito, Eurico sangacurici eurico sanga quimagua sanga nampe, nampe sanga mariba, The owl drinks the blood of the dead and flies to the sea.

The terms of the acts of worship were particularly heavy, sultry, and held in their sound alone the oppressive significance of fetishes as black as the night from which they were shaped. The minister of death to Sinanecua, a ceremony which became traditional, was named Cuanon-Araferrobre, and the act of sacrifice the Acua Meropo. The singers before the altar, making visible the sacred stick, Baston Mocongo, intoned Mocongo Machevere, Mosongo moto c.u.mbaba eribo, and Erendio basi Bome, I believe in G.o.d and G.o.d is great; with, at the last, silencing the profession of faith, the voice of the drum, tarinibongo.

The nanigos had been driven from the streets through which, at first, on King's Day, Dia Reyes, they were permitted, once a year, to parade with native costumes and instruments--atables and marugas and ecous, a flattened bell struck by a thin stick. Their fambas were destroyed and hysteria cooled; but I wondered about both the secretiveness and the persistence of the primitive spirit and the delicate melancholy that veiled the girl so faintly tinged with carabalie, resting below my box through the rasping strains of the danzon. Had her gain been greater than the loss, the ruin, of her simplicity; had she, dragged abruptly from saurian shadows, been made white by an arbitrary papal sun?

A glimmering dawn, faintly salt with the presence of the sea, was evident in the Parque Central when I walked the short distance, not more than a few steps, from the opera house to the Inglaterra, my head filled with the resonant bos and bongos of naniguismo. Havana, for a moment, seemed like a cemetery--its own marble cemetery of Colon--where a black spirit, buried in a secret grave, walked and would not be still. I speculated about that same spirit in another connection--in its influence on painting and music, on Western literature. It had affected dancing profoundly, making it, in the United States, almost wholly its own; and the Spanish, with whom, in the richness of a tradition and perfect expression, no others could compete, owed a great debt to Africa. Our music, too, it had influenced to such a degree that it was doubtful if we had any outside the beat of negro strains.

Stephen Foster, a great composer in that he had enclosed the whole sentiment of an age within his medium, was often but a paraphrase of a darker melody. Foster, like Havana, was Victorian, a period that dreamed of marble halls, set in a pitch impossible now, and yet, curiously, charged for an unsympathetic world with significant beauty. This negro contribution was in a melancholy and minor key, the invariable tone of all primitive song; in poetry, as well, a lyrical poetry nearly approaching music, there was an a.n.a.logous coloring between the race and its shadowed measures.

The reminiscent emotions that, with us, were mainly personal, in the negro were tribal; he had not been individualized, brought to a separate consciousness; and, in consequence, his song, practically lacking in intellect, dealt only with instinctive feelings. Growing shrill with pa.s.sion and sinking to the monotonous laments of formless sorrow, it belonged equally to all the men, the women, who heard it--it was their voice and comprehensible triumph or pain; without artifice it wasn't artificial nor ever insincere; and, as a means of gold, a medium for lies, it had no existence. The voice of all, an instrument of natural beauty, shared by villages, its pure quality, brought in slave ships that rotted with their dead on the sea, gave the shallow and vitiated West a fresh earthen tonic chord.

The negro, naturally, hadn't grown more cheerful in his new imposed setting; and it was possible that his music had gained an added depth, at any rate for our perception, from the weight of banishment and shackles. He had not turned with any success to creative accomplishment that needed mental independence and courage, or to forms, like the novel, wholly modern. On the other side, the novel, with all its trumpeted young freedom, had never, with even relative truth, expressed the negro in the Americas. This, a subject of appalling splendor, had, in the United States, been turned over to the comic spirit and short impressions--stories, superficially, falsely, pathetic. The fact was that we had enormously harmed the negro, and for that reason, in the familiar process of human self-esteem, nationally we were uneasy, resentful in his presence. We saw him, when we escaped from absolute hatred, as a figure, a subject, without dignity: we lacked there the penetrative sympathy which was the soul of imaginative fiction. Such a novel, I thought, was perhaps of everything that offered the best worth writing.

Certainly nothing more difficult could be well attempted; my knowledge, in Havana and through the nanigos, had been perceptibly enlarged, and I was not unfamiliar with the state in which, I decided, the story must be laid--not in Virginia, but upon a level grey reach of Louisiana, cut by tideless bayous and saturated with the fever of cane and cypress brakes.

A bitter novel like the broom herb put in the ceremonial drink Mucuba, pages from which it would be hard to exclude a fury of hopelessness! And what an angry disturbed wasplike hum it would provoke! No magazine, of course, would touch it--it would be sold, for a week or ten days, from under counters, and then we, my novel and myself, metaphorically burned.

A magnificent project:

A huddle of cabins at the edge of a wall of black pines beyond a deep ruined field--but perhaps this was South Carolina--infinitesimal ragged patches of corn, a sandy trail lost abruptly in the close forest, and half-naked portentous shapes. There would be a town back in the country with a desolate red square of great sprawling water-oaks smothered in hanging moss, a place at once old and raw, and ugly with vindictive ignorance.... The negroes were infinitely happier in Havana, where the heat, the palms, were their own; and I was surprised that they didn't desert the United States in a body for a suaver spirit in the air and man. Cuba, to a large measure, with what final result I wasn't concerned, had absorbed them in the manner that Spain had absorbed the Moors. Havana made some denial of this, and prided itself, with entire justice where it was true, on unmixed Castilian blood; but the other was perceptible in the gait, the very whiteness, of Cuba's princ.i.p.al city--the whitest walls on earth. This didn't bother me; I liked Havana from its farthest view to its most intimate facade, and I was grateful to whatever had made it.

In my room the negro, with the danzon, faded from my mind; and I only paused to speculate dimly about his overwhelming preference, where a choice existed, for the Protestant religions instead of Roman Catholicism. I should have thought that the color, the imagery and incense, of the Catholic Church would be irresistible. Yet there were, in the United States, thousands of colored Methodists and Baptists for one adherent of Rome. It might be that the hymns of Methodism, sufficiently melancholy and barbarous in figure, G.o.d knew, were the reason--the character of the hymns and congregational singing, the loud pictorial shouts. The later religion of the negroes, in addition to what I had already considered, was a subject to be avoided; but running through my mind was the memory that in Richmond, not long ago, it was common in the evenings of spring for bands of negroes to go through the streets singing spirituals and constantly gathering others who dropped their work, their responsibilities, to join the pa.s.sing chorus of hope.

That was lost now, I understood, a vanished custom, killed by self-consciousness; but it would have been a fine thing to hear approaching and receding through the dusk, a stirring resinous volume or a mere vibrant echo, a dying whisper. Perhaps that, a dying whisper, would be the solving of the whole tragic difficulty--disease and winter and relentless natural laws. The latter moved with great deliberation through unlimited centuries, but the impatience of men demanded instant release from trouble. They wanted black black and white white, with no transition, no blurring of the edges; this was their dream, but they constantly defeated it, betrayed their ideal. Yes, it might be that the humility of that defeat, in the far future, would accomplish a universally white city. Only one other way offered: a different humanity from any which had yet appeared outside rare individuals ... but that vision seemed, to me, as fantastic as the sentence in Carabalie Bricamo that gave it expression, Eruco en llenison comunbairan abasi otete alleri pongo--We of this world are all together. The truth was, honestly at heart, that I couldn't commit myself to all, or even a quarter, of what this would have demanded. Impersonally I was able to see that, as an idea, it was superb, I realized that something of it must inform my pages; but it was useless to pretend that I could begin to carry it out or that I was, in practice, a Christian. I was tired, and my thoughts grew confused, but dimly in my mind was again the consciousness of the remote fate of the creative writer, an individual without even the desire to be a part of that for which he cried.

Certainly I had no marked love of humanity the following morning, caught with a small mob in a narrow pa.s.sage of the wharf where I was waiting to board the steamer for Key West. I was between the water and a wooden part.i.tion, the heat was savage, and a number of youthful marines, returning home from Camaguey, were indulging in a characteristic humor--the dealing of unsuspected blows, of jarring force, among themselves. They shoved each other, in a crowd shoulder to shoulder, disregarding entirely the indirect results of their vigor, and exchanged threats of fulminating violence. They were not more annoying than the others, but only more evident; and, as the advertised time of departure was past by an hour, and then a second hour, and the sun found its way into our walled s.p.a.ce, even the marines subsided. Every trace of dignity, in that heat, ran away from the people about me. While, on the whole, they were uncomplaining, even relatively considerate of others'

discomforts, wondering, with weary smiles, when the boat would be off, I had no such kindly promptings.... I hated them all, the ugliness of the women and the men's dull or merely sharp faces, with an intensity that wasn't normal. When I was very young indeed, scarcely past two, I had been nearly crushed in a throng after the Sesquicentennial parade in Philadelphia; long afterward I had been, to all practical purposes, asphyxiated in a train that broke down in an Apennine tunnel; as a result, I had an unreasoning fear of crowded bodies or limited s.p.a.ce; and this dread, before long, on the Havana wharf, turned into an acute aversion for every individual and thing about me.

The surrounding insistent good nature developed in flashes of exchanged homely wit, varied by the att.i.tudes of restraint, and, of them both, I couldn't tell which I resented more. The present position of the waiting people, the long exposure to the intolerable sun, was the result of their patience; of that and their personal inefficiency reflected in their official management. All the bad governments in the world, the dishonesty and universal muddles, were nothing more than monuments to the immeasurable stupidity and greed of the people; they were betrayed politically not by powerful and unscrupulous parties and men, but by themselves; perpetually and always by their own laziness and superst.i.tion and jealousy.

The Cubenos, the original inhabitants of Cuba, were parcelled in the bondage of encomiendas, exterminated by the pa.s.sion of the Spanish Crown for gold; when they had been sacrificed, Africa was raked by slavers for labor in the mines and planting; beneath every movement, instigated by hope or supported by returns, riches were the incentive and power. Men had never, within history and their secret hearts, cared for anything else: an ineradicable desire. There was a facile public gabble about the qualities of the spirit, about soul; but the solid fact of money, both as an abstraction and what conspicuously it brought, was what the people worshipped, wanted, what they schemed or stole for, or in the service of which they performed the most heroic toil.

This was not, necessarily, an ign.o.ble or negligible pursuit, but it was corrupted by an attending hypocrisy which forced a fervent denial, the pretense of an utterly different purpose, to be worn like a cloak. It was possible that, admitted, the sovereignty of gold would be the most beneficial rule applicable to man. It was preeminently the symbol, the signature, of power; with the late sugar crops it had revolutionized Cuba. Havana was for the moment, in a very strong sense, the capital of the world, and the visible mark of that was the stream of automobiles on the Prado and Malecon; individually, money was counted by the million--the recognition, the desired reward, of the fact that Cuba controlled a necessity of life. The instinct to profit by such turns of fortune was deeper than any charitable impulse; there was a tendency to speculate in wheat more general than the impulse to give loaves to the starving.

There was a sudden surge toward the gang plank of the City of Miami, and I was borne onto the steamer, away from Havana, in an exasperated and bitter spirit. I had entered the harbor happily, saturated by its beauty, but I was leaving blind to the marble walls on the blue water.

However, it was cooler on an upper deck; and with my back uncompromisingly turned on humanity, on my fellow pa.s.sengers over a sea like a tranquil illusion of respite between stubborn realities, I picked out from the panorama of the city across the harbor, diminishing in its narrow entrance, familiar buildings and marks. Havana vanished, I thought, far more rapidly than it had come into view; soon nothing of Cuba could be seen but the dark green hills and thinly printed silhouettes of mountains. I had it, though, in my memory; Havana was now woven into the fibre of my being.

The Inglaterra Hotel took its place with all the remembered spots where I had lived: the bare pine-sealed room in the Virginia mountains, the tall narrow house in Geneva, the courtyard in the Via San Gallo, the brick house in a suburb from which, in a rebellion against every circ.u.mstance of my life, I had escaped. I recalled days on end when I had tried to write without the ability to form a single acceptable sentence, when the floor was heaped and littered with pages crushed and flung away. Then, it had seemed, I should get nowhere, and see, do, nothing.... Havana was a singularly lovely city. A rush of small mementos of its life flooded my mind--the aroma of the cigars, the coolness of the Telegrafo Cafe and the savor of its Daiquiri c.o.c.ktails, the burning strip of sunlight that, at noon, found its way into Obispo Street. It was still possible to get Ron Bacardi in the United States. I was carrying back a large provision of exceedingly fine cigars, not from the Larranaga factory, but a slender Corona, a shape specially rolled for a discrimination as delicate as any in Cuba. Yet, away from Havana, they wouldn't taste the same; in the United States they'd deteriorate; and, where I lived, there were no fresh, no emerald-green limes, and without them a Daiquiri was robbed of its inimitable flavor.

But what, more than those, I should miss was the atmosphere of Havana itself, the gay urbanity and festive lightness of tone. It had almost wholly escaped the modern pa.s.sion for reform changing America, pretty much all the western world, into a desert of precept and correction; in many senses Havana was an oasis in an aridity spreading day by day. Any improvement wouldn't occur during my life--the habit of lies and self-delusion had become a fundamental part of society--and all I could hope for was the discovery of rare individuals and cities in which existence was more than a penalty for having been born. I wanted them as a relaxation, as short escapes from a tyranny from which, really, I was powerless to turn:

I didn't want to live in Havana, nor to be surrounded by exceptional people; for they were both enemies of what, above everything, I wanted to do--to write into paper and ink some permanence of beauty. For that, Chester County and the solid stone block of my house were necessary, a temperate climate indispensable. At heart, in spite of my constant fault-finding, my threats of leaving, I was bound by a.s.sociations deeper than mere intelligence. No, nothing so powerful as an obsession had overtaken me approaching Havana; I was not, in actuality, an adventurer, but only a seeker for charm, for memories, to carry back to the low window to which I had already referred. The charm of Havana was its strangeness, the vividness of its sudden impression on me, the temporary freedom, grace, it offered. It was characteristic of freedom, too, that, in the end, it became slavery; while slavery had, at times, extraordinarily the appearance of freedom. Not a month ago I had dropped, with a sigh, a gasp of relief, a pen heavier than anything else on earth, and now I could scarcely restrain the eagerness--the confidence, at last, of success--with which I wanted to take it up again.

When I turned, looking back, Cuba had vanished, sunk below the line of the sea. The Gulf Stream was indigo; along the side of the steamer, foam hissed with a sharp whiteness, and at the bow miniature rainbows hung shimmering in the spray. The perpetual soft clouds of the Gulf Stream were very high and faint. In my imagination Havana a.s.sumed a magic, a mythical, state--a vision that, I was certain, had no absolute ponderable existence. It was a city created on a level bright tide, under l.u.s.trous green hills, for the reward of cherished and unworldly dreams. It was the etherealized spectacle of the sanguine hopes of all the conquistadores who had set sail for the rubies of c.i.p.ango; they had had great desires of white marble cities in which the women were lovely and dark, and gold was worked into the forms of every day.

They, different from the frugal Dutch, making, with no less daring, the Eastern Pa.s.sage in the interest of a.s.sociated merchants and of commonwealths, sailed, in a more picturesque phrase, for their Catholic Majesties and for Spain. The Dutch names, Bonteke and Schouten and Roggeveen, had a solid bartering sound compared with Francesco de Cordoba and Miruelo and Angel de Villafane. Holland had its deathless tradition of the sea, sufficiently colored with extravagant adventure; but its spirit was sober, the visions of its navigators would never have lingered in a marble city.

Havana was, perhaps, a Saragossa of souls, with the acts and thoughts of its early vivid years, of Carenas, forever held in the atmosphere, audible in the restless volume of sound that was never still. Its history had flashed through my mind with the turn of a wheel, its duration seeming no more than the opening and shutting of a hand; but now I had an impression not of the transient, not of walls and names and voices, but of qualities impersonal and permanent, of something which, while individual men died, resisted death. It had existence, that was, as long as humanity drew a continuous thread of memory through time.

Havana had, outwardly, changed from its first huddle of bohios and fortified tower; but the form it had taken, so different from the discovered reality, had beyond any question that odd similitude to Marco Polo's reports of the Grand Khanate. Its final architecture, pseudo-cla.s.sic, was more abstract than any other imaginable order: all the dress that had ever paraded through the successive stages of the city--the Cacquies, girdled in feathers, the brocades of Maria de Toledo and her lady-in-waiting, Captain G.o.doy in steel and lace, the floating crinoline of the Prince of Anglona's year, painted black nanigos--was equally possible against a background at once fantastic and restrained.

There was never a more complex spirit than Havana's, no stranger mingling of chance and climate and race had ever occurred; but, remarkably, a unity of effect had been the result, such a singleness as that possessed by an opera, in which, above the orchestra and the settings and the voices, there was perceptible a transcending emotion created from an artificial and illogical means. For while Havana had a record dignified in its sweep, it could never be long dominant either as a city or in its men; it had ruled an island but not the world, it had never been--in that lat.i.tude--a Captain-general of a hemisphere. No, it wasn't symphonic, but the lesser, more pictorial, performance; it had, I thought, very much the appearance of a stage.

This, however was not a denial of the reality of the blood it shed, nor of the sharpness and danger of its emotions; it had been a profusely b.l.o.o.d.y city with tropical pa.s.sions often reaching ideals of sacrifice.

It had, too, suffered the iron of oppression, spoken its word for liberty, the state which, never to be realized, by its bare conception elevated life. Now, in addition, it was a great port ... and yet, though it might have been the fault of my limitations, I continued to see Havana as more dramatic than essential; I heard persistently the overture with the themes of Seville, the crying native airs, the drums of Guinea played with the fingers. The shining crooked bay was filled by the plate ships of Mexico and Peru, with their high-decked sterns and yellow cannon. The curtain fell to rise again on Don Miguel Tacon!

It was impossible to determine what I had seen of Havana and what was merely my reflected self; even hard to decide if I had seen Havana objectively at all, since my att.i.tude toward it had been so purely personal. My memory was composed of what I'd experienced and the reflections, the thoughts, that had given birth to; and, of them, the latter were the more real, solider than the Prado, more tangible than the dining-room of the Inglaterra. Without them Havana would have been meaningless, sterile, simply a museum about which nothing could be written but a catalogue. It was its special charm to be charged with sensations rather than facts; a place where facts--not, of a kind, absent--could be safely ignored. Further than that, ignoring them was, for any measure of pleasure, absolutely needful: the pedantic spirit in Havana was fatal.

What, almost entirely, I had been told to view, expected to enjoy, I had avoided; yet not that, for it implied a deliberate will, and such a planning or triumph of character had been as far as possible from my drifting: I had seen what I preferred and done what I was; anyone, following me in Havana, could have judged me with exact.i.tude. I had spent money lavishly--as though I were rich instead of extravagant--for visible returns that would have only provoked the other pa.s.sengers on the City of Miami. They, where they were not driven to staterooms by the dipping of the steamer, were vociferous with knowledge about Cuba, their bags were heavy with souvenirs--the Coty perfumes from France and the table-linen of the Canary Islands. The pervasive salesmen, flushed with success and Scotch whisky, smoking the cigars long familiar to them in northern hotels, hinted together of the Parisian girls and criollos, to whom they referred as creoles in the meaning and vocabulary of American burlesque. Some officials of transportation and sugar manipulators sat aside, with double Coronas, exchanging in short sentences their hardness of knowledge, speaking of Cuba as an estancia of which they were absentee owners. A flight of winged fish skittered over the sea, and the clouds following the Gulf Stream turned rose with the dropping of the sun; the horizon bore a suggestion of Florida. Once Cuba, regarded as the sh.o.r.e of India, had been the center of the West, and Florida no more than a chimera: how ironic such errors and reversals were! Now it was Juana that was legendary, and Florida resembled the significant hooked finger of an imponderable power. The day slid rapidly into water that had lost its blueness for expanses of chalky shallow green, and the flat roofs of Key West and masoned arches became slowly visible across the sea, and a stir of departure filled the decks.

I was, for a moment, depressed at the definite leaving behind of Havana--for the tranquil pa.s.sage had seemed only an extension of its spirit--and by the imminent reshouldering of my burden of responsibility. I had never wanted that, but, without choice, it had been abruptly thrust on me--a responsibility, impossible of fulfilment, which I couldn't put down. When I was young I had looked in vain for a perpetual Havana, hoping for nothing more; and now, when my youth was dead, I had found the perfection of my desire. But, as always, the discovery was too late; I couldn't stay in the covered paseos, the plazas with flambeau trees and royal palms or idle in a room of Moorish tiles with a dripping fountain, over a magic drink; my time for the actualities of charming liberty, the possession of uncounted days, was gone. But this mood was nothing more than a gesture, a sentiment, thrown back to romance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: image of the book's back cover]

The following typographical errors were corrected by the etext transcriber:

beginninng of the Prado=>beginning of the Prado

like a harsh native wine, from Balbao=>like a harsh native wine, from Bilbao