Part 2 (2/2)

This was not a complaint against The Velvet Glove except as it equally applied to me; but an intense desire for a fresh talent, an ability to which we could, without reserve, take off our hats. The fact hit me that I was forty, although it was still the fas.h.i.+on among reviewers to speak of me as a promising young man, and that there were patches of grey hair on my temples. Yet I had been, everything considered, remarkably successful; there was no need for sentimental regret, a trait of mental feebleness.

I decided to do something positive that evening, to go to the theatre, or, if it were playing, to see the Jai Alai. The latter was possible, and, by way of the Telegrafo, I reached the Hotel Florida for dinner; a restaurant which, because of the windows looking down on it, had the pleasant individual air of a courtyard. The music played, diners came and went, and I gazed up at the shallow balconies in the hopefulness of an incorrigible imagination. The Fronton Jai Alai--in Havana the game, pelota, had taken the t.i.tle of its court--was a long way from Obispo Street, but I knew when we had reached it by the solid volume of shouting that escaped from the high concrete building into the dim neighborhood.

Inside, the court was an immense expanse with granite-laid walls, a long rectangle, one side of which was formed by the steeply banked rows of spectators. Regular s.p.a.ces were marked by white lines on the playing floor, and at one end the score was hung against the names of the players, now two teams--the Azules and the Blancos. The boxes were above the cement ledges packed with standing men, by a promenade, where the betting was conducted, cigars sold, and a small active bar maintained.

It was the night of a gala benefit, for the Damas de Caridad, and I had been fortunate in getting a single box seat. I was late, though, and the game progressing; still, I was the first in our railed s.p.a.ce; but the others, who proved to be Americans, soon followed--three prosperous men, manufacturers I thought, with wives in whom native good taste had been given the opportunities of large resources.

One of the women--who, in the arrangement of the box, sat beside me--smiled with a magnetism that had easily survived the loss of her youth; she was rather silent than not, but the rest swept into a conversation in their best public manner. A man accompanying them, it developed, knew Cuba and Jai Alai, and he secured for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the others a cesta, the basket-like racquet worn strapped to the arm. It was from him I discovered that the court was two hundred and ten feet long and thirty-six feet wide; while the service consisted in dropping the ball and, on its rebound, catching it in the cesta and throwing it against the far end wall. From there, with a sharp smack audible all over the Fronton, the ball shot back, if not a fault, within a marked area, and one of the opposing side caught it, in the air or on the first bounce, and returned it against the end wall. At first I could see nothing but the violent activity of the players, frozen into statuesque att.i.tudes of throwing; vigorous figures in, mostly, white, with soft red silk sashes. I heard the ball hit, and saw it rolling out of play; and then, with some slight realization of the rapidity of its flight, I was able to follow the course from cesta to wall and floor.

There had never been, I was certain, another game in which instantaneous judgment, skill, and endurance had been carried to such a far point.

There was seldom a fault or error; the ball, flying like a bullet, was caught and flung with a single gesture; again and again it carried from one end wall to the other, from which it was hurled on. Angles of flight were calculated and controlled, the long side wall was utilized.... Then a player of the Azules was. .h.i.t in the ankle, and the abruptness with which he went down showed me a possibility I had ignored.

During this the clamor of the audience was indescribable, made up, for the most part, of the difficulties of constantly s.h.i.+fting odds and betting. The odds changed practically with every pa.s.sage of the ball: opening at, say, five to three against the favorites, as they drew steadily ahead in a game of twenty-five points it jumped to eight to four, ten to three, anything that could be placed. On the floor a small company of bookmakers, distinguished by their scarlet caps, shouted in every direction, and betting paper was thrown adroitly through the air in hollow rubber b.a.l.l.s. Those who had backed at favorable odds the team now far ahead were yelling jubilantly, and others were trying, at the expense of their lungs, to cover by hedging their probable losses.

There was, however, toward what should have been the end, an unlooked-for development--the team apparently hopelessly behind crept up. An astounded pause followed, and then an uproar rose that cast the former sound into insignificance. Soon the score was practically tied: there were shrill entreaties, ba.s.so curses, a storm of indiscriminate insults. Now the backers of the lesser couple scrambled vocally to take advantage of the betting opportunities forever lost--the odds were even, then depressed on the other side. When the game was over the noise died instantly: men black with pa.s.sion, shaking with rage, crus.h.i.+ng their hats or with lifted clenched fists, at once conversed with smiling affability. My eyes had been badly strained, and I was glad to leave the box and stroll along the promenade. The betting counters were jammed by the owners of winning tickets, the men behind the bar were, in their own way, as active as the pelota players.

The majority of the boxes were occupied by Cuban families, but yet there was an appreciable number of foreigners. A slender girl, in a low dinner dress, was sitting on the railing of her box, swinging a graceful slipper and smoking a cigarette--New York was indelibly stamped on her--and, among the masculine world of Spanish antecedents, she created a frank center of interest. For her part, she studied the crowd quite blocking the way below her with a cold indifference, the personification of young a.s.sured arrogance.

A quiniela followed, with six contestants, one against the other in successive pairs; but my eyes were now definitely exhausted by the necessarily s.h.i.+fting gaze, and my interest fastened on the woman beside me. She was at once intimately attached to the people with her and abstracted in bearing: a woman not far from fifty, but graceful still and, in a flexible black silk crepe with a broad girdle of jet, still desirable. It seemed to me that, in spite of an admirable manner, she was a little impatient at the volubility around her; or it might be, in contradiction to this, she was exercising a patience based on fort.i.tude.

It was clear that she hadn't a great deal in common with the man who had evidently been married to her for a considerable length of years. They spoke little--it was he who had fetched the cesta--both immersed in individual thoughts. A woman, I decided, finely sensitive, superior; who, as she had grown older, had found no demand for the qualities which she knew to be her best.

A painful situation, a shocking waste, from which, for her, there was no escape, for she had patently what was known as character. She at once was conscious of the absolute need for spiritual freedom and bound by commitments paramount to her self-esteem. But even if she had been more daring, less conscientious, what could she have gained; what was there for her in a society condemned to express the spirit in the terms of flesh? She had too much charm, too great a vitality, to be absorbed in the superficial affairs of women, the subst.i.tute life of charity. And once married, probably to a man the model of kindly faith, she was caught in a desert of sterile monotony. Even children, I could see, if they existed, had not slain her questioning attractive personality.

She smiled at me again, later, her narrow slightly wasting hands clasped about a knee--a smile of sympathetic comprehension and unquenchable woman. She would have been happier chattering in the obvious strain of stupidity behind her: any special beauty was always paid for in the imposed loneliness of a spoken or unspoken surrounding resentment. To be content with a facile compliment, the majority of tricks at auction bridge, mechanical pleasures, was the measure of wisdom for women in her situation. The last quiniela over, plainly weary she gathered a cloak about her shoulders and left the box, without, as I had hoped, some last gesture or even a word: and I pictured her sitting listlessly, distraught, in the cafe to which they were proceeding.

The pelota immediately vanished from my mind before the infinitely more fundamental and interesting problem of marriage; and--remembering the ominous sign of a woman's club on the Malecon--I wondered if the Cuban women were contented with the tradition as it had been handed down to them. In the life that I knew in the north, an infinitesimal grain of sand irritating in the body of the United States, the sacredness of matrimony had waned very seriously; it would, of course, go on, probably for ever, since no other arrangement could be thought of conciliating the necessities of both dreams and property; but, subjected to the scrutiny of intelligence rather than sentimentality, it seemed both impotent and foolish. The impotence certainly, for whereas my grandfather had thirteen children and my mother four--or was it five?--I had none. There had always been individuals unrestrained by the complicated oaths of the wedding service--a strictly legal proceeding to which the church had been permitted to add its furbelows--dissatisfied ladies, and gentlemen of the commercial road. I wasn't referring to them, but to the look, at once puzzled, humorous, and impatient, that lately I had seen wives of probity turn on their husbands.

They expressed the conviction that the purely masculine aphorism to the effect that home was the place for women meant nothing more than a clearing of the decks for unrestricted action. This was beautifully displayed, confirmed, in Havana, where decks were without a single impediment; and I speculated about the att.i.tude of the Cuban women in houses barred with both actual and metaphorical iron. Tradition weighed heavily on their outlook; but there was that club on the Malecon.

Tradition had bound the farm wives of Pennsylvania, yet they were progressively rebelling against the insanity of endless labor and isolation. But, perversely, the married groups I saw in Havana were remarkably close, simple, and happy. They sat in rows at the concerts on the plazas, went off on small excursions, in entire harmony--a thing impossible to the born American, with whom such parties began in exasperation and ended in nervous exhaustion. An American husband, of the cla.s.s largely evident in Havana, escorted his family abroad with truculence and an air of shame at being exposed in such a ridiculous situation. If there was more than one household implicated, the men invariably drew away together: there was a predominance of cursing and the wails of irritably smacked children. The truth was that the citizens of the United States, in their feverish pa.s.sage through life, had decidedly a poor time--either restlessness or ambition or dissatisfaction destroyed their peace of mind. Labor, more highly paid than at any other place or time, got less satisfaction for its money than a Cuban mestizo with a peseta.

My thoughts returned abruptly to the point where they had started, to marriage, and I hoped that Cuba wouldn't be disorganized by the present ferment; that the feminine element, discovering their wrongs, wouldn't leave their balconies and patios for the dusty publicity of the street.

Already a decline had been suffered, first in the loss of mantillas and combs, next in the pa.s.sing of single-horse victorias for unrestrained tin locomotives, and then in the hideous flood of electric lighting.

Still, a great deal of the charm, the empire, of Havana women remained; while nothing but utter disaster approached them from the north.

This was no new position for me, and it had never failed to be attacked, usually with the insinuation that, spiritually, I was part of Turkey in Asia ... a place of gardens where it was not inconceivable that I'd be happy: certainly the politics there were no worse than those to which I had been inured from birth, with murder on the streets at noon distinguished by a white ribbon in its b.u.t.tonhole. The Armenians were no more precariously situated than the Albigenses under Innocent III. I had heard, as well, that the governments of Cuba had not been free from suspicion, but it was hoped that elections supervised from the United States would inst.i.tute reform. Rare irony! Elections, I should have said, going back once more to the beginning, opening to emanc.i.p.ated women.

Gathering, in imagination, all the feminine world of Havana into a fragrant a.s.sembly, I begged them not to separate themselves from their privileges; I implored them even--against my personal inclination, for there, at least, I was no Turk--not to grow slender, if that meant agile excursions into loud spheres of lesser influence. Those others, I proceeded, would rapturously exchange a ballot for a seductive ankle, a graceful breast, or a flawless complexion. Complexion, or rather its absence, brought immeasurably more supporting votes to the women's party than convictions. And I added, reprehensibly, some of the things I had been privately told, as a writer, by women newly in the professions: I exposed the secret of a lecturer on civic improvement--or it might have been better babies; I couldn't recall which--who carried a handbagful of apostrophies to Paolo and Francesca, and that illogical lot, on her travels. She permitted me to read them in a sunny orchard where the apples were already, more than ripe, on the ground; and her gaze had persistently strayed to the wasting fruit.

The audience melted away--I was unable to discover if they were flattered or annoyed--and I found myself actually seated at one of the small tables on the fringe of the the dansant at the Sevilla. The Cascade Orchestra from the Biltmore, their necks hung with the imitation wreaths of Hawaii, were playing a musical pastiche of many lands and a single purpose; and there, foxtrotting intently among girls from the New York Follies and girls on follies of their own, colliding with race track touts from Jefferson Park and suave predatory gentlemen of San Francisco, I found a whole section of young Cuba.

They returned, in the intermissions, to chaperons complacent or secretly disturbed, where they had, princ.i.p.ally, refrescos; but their att.i.tude was one of progress and conscious, patronizing superiority to old-fas.h.i.+oned customs. The daughters of what, in many aspects, was the Spanish-Cuban aristocracy of the island, were dancing publicly in a hotel. Here, already, was an example of emanc.i.p.ation. I disliked it, naturally, not on moral grounds, but because it foreshadowed the destruction of individuality, the loss, eventually, of Havana, of Cuba, of Spain ... of everything distinguished that saved the world from monotony.

They danced--the Cuban youth--with notable facility, adding to the hesitation waltz something specially their own, a more intense rhythm, a greater potentiality; their bodies were at once more fluid and positive; they were swept up into a mood unknown to the adamant ornaments of Country Club verandas in the north. A cosmopolitan waiter, anxious to have me finish and move on, hovered about the table, ignorant of a traditional courtesy as well as of the requirements of the climate. All the objectionable features of Broadway cafes, of public ostentation, mingled servility and insolence, dishonesty--my pina colado was diluted beyond taste--were being flung, with the air of a favor, into Havana.

Although, for the best, I was even then a little late, I was glad that I had seen the city when I did, just as I was glad to have known Venice before the Campanile fell, and the Virginia Highlands when they had not been modernized. The change of Havana within itself, from palm thatch to marble, was entrancing; but the arbitrary imposition of stupid habits, standards, conduct, from outside, d.a.m.nable.

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