Part 1 (2/2)
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 s.h.i.+rt, 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.
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