Part 3 (1/2)
In the end the waiter was more forceful than my determination to remain until my drink and thoughts were at an end, and I rose with them uncompleted, in a very ill temper. If Cuba hadn't enough innate taste and nationality to save herself, she must go the popular way to obliteration. So much else had gone! But later, at the Hotel de Luz, untouched yet by the hand of imported cupidity, my happiness in Havana returned.
The Hotel de Luz, inimitably Cuban, with the s.h.i.+pping lying vaguely behind an orderly foliage at the Muelle outside, had a dining-room partly divided by wooden screens that merged informally into the surrounding halls and s.p.a.ces, and an air that was an acc.u.mulation of tradition, like an invisible film lying over everything. A multiplication of unexpected advent.i.tious detail accomplished, in its ent.i.ty, the strangeness, at once enticing and a little sinister, characteristic of Havana. There was, lurking about, in the darker corners and pa.s.sages, a feeling almost of dread, uncomfortable to meet.
And, exploring, I pa.s.sed a room without windows, largely the color of dried blood, the quintessence of a nightmare. The third floor, laid in a triangle of, perhaps, ninety degrees, raised immense corridors paved in black and white marble blocks, down the long perspective of which moving figures were reduced to furtive mannikins and voices were lost in an upper murmur.
I sat, for a while, in a walnut rocking chair at an end of the sweep, which amazed me by an architecture, the impressiveness of which approached oppression. A wall was broken by a file of slatted doors, and from one of these came the minute irritable clatter of a typewriter; the bell at the finish of a line sounded like the s.h.i.+ver of a tapped gla.s.s, and a child spoke. It was difficult to think of the Hotel de Luz as a place of normal residence, as existing at all except in the mental fantasias of Piranesi--it resembled exactly one of his sere vertiginous engravings. Yet it was, I knew, the favorite hotel of travelers from the Canary Islands.
Continuing to rock slightly and smoke, I pursued the extremely recondite subject of just such impressions as I had there received: a very important inquiry, for it had to do with the secret, the unintelligible heart, of my writing. There was, obviously, in the Hotel de Luz nothing intrinsically terrifying, strange. My att.i.tude toward it would be dismissed as absurd by the Canary Islanders. But the effect it produced on me was tangible, ponderable; it tyrannized over my imagination and drove it into corridors of thought as sombre as that in reality before me. I had seen the Piranesi engravings when I was very young and painfully susceptible to mental darkness and fears; and they had undoubtedly left their indelible mark ... now brought out by the black and white marble squares diminis.h.i.+ng with the walls in parallel lines.
The reality of what I felt, then, lay in the combining of the surroundings and my imagination--a condition, a result, if not unique, at least unlikely to be often repeated. The sum of another emotional experience and the Hotel de Luz would be totally different, but equally true with my own; and from that confusion misunderstanding arose. The actuality was neither concrete nor subjective; yet, woven of these double threads, it was absolute. The individuality of places and hours absorbed me; there was no word in English to express my meaning--the perception of the inanimate moods of place. It belonged, rather than to the novel, to the painter, and possibly occupied too great a s.p.a.ce in my pages. Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than the people in or out of them.
But it was no longer possible, if it had ever been, to disentangle one from the other, the personal from what seemed the impersonal; for, while nature was carelessly free from beauty and sentiment and morals, it had been invested with each of these qualities in turn by a differently developing intelligence. The elements of nature, partly in hand, were arbitrarily and subconsciously projected in set forms. I stopped to think how the mobility of mind perpetually solidified, like cement, about itself; how fluid ideas, aspirations, always hardened into inst.i.tutions, then prisons, then mortuary vaults. Religion had done this signally, both profoundly and superficially--it was impossible to picture the faith of John Fox under the frescoes of La Merced Church, a Methodist exuberance in St. Michael's at Richmond; the Roman ritual was as much a thing of its silver altars as the Episcopal Church in Virginia depended on historic communion services and austere box pews.
Not only was I specially intent on these values: my inability to see men as free from them, as spiritual conquistadores, had been a cause of difficulty in the popularity and sale of my books. I lacked both the conceptions of man as an Atlas, holding up the painted globe, or an individual mounting securely into perpetuity. If the latter were true, if there were no death, the dignity of all the great tragic moments of life and art, the splendor of sacrifice, was cheapened to nothing. I would have gladly surrendered these for the privilege of continued existence--in a sphere not dominated by hymnology--but, skeptical of the future, all I possessed, my sole ideal, was a pa.s.sionate admiration for the courage of a humanity condemned to the loss of warm life.
I had grown more serious than I intended, than, in Havana, was necessary; what I had set out to discover was simply the explanation of my feeling about the Hotel de Luz; but undoubtedly it was better for me to accept emotions, merely to record them, than attempt a.n.a.lysis.
I had had very little schooling in processes of exact thought, practically no mental gymnastics. But this was not an imposed hards.h.i.+p on which I looked back with regret--I had been free to fill my life with scholastic routine, but balked absolutely: in cla.s.s rooms a blankness like a fog had settled over me, from which, after a short half-hearted struggle, I emerged to follow what, namelessly, interested me. That, for example, was precisely the manner of my stay in Havana. A course for which the worst was predicted, specially since I persisted in writing.
And I could see how I'd be censured by the frugal-minded for such a book as I was more than likely to bring to San Cristobal de la Habana.
There was, in reality, no practical reason to write about it at all, since it had been admirably and thoroughly described, the sights, pleasures, and sounds, in reputable and laudatory paragraphs, a source of pride to the natives. Here no one could predict, in my search, what would seem important, to be transcribed--the colored gla.s.s above a window, the sugar at the bottom of a c.o.c.ktail--and my moral sense, of course, would be as impotent as my political position was negligible.
Yet the qualities ignored by a more solemn intelligence than mine were precisely what formed the spirit of Havana; their comprehension was necessary to that perception of an inanimate mood of place.
I was constantly in a disagreement with the accepted opinion of what were, at bottom, the more serious facts, the determining pressures of existence; and it had always been at the back of my head to write a novel built from just such trivialities as, it seemed to me, enormously affected human fate. A very absorbing idea that had gone as far as an introduction called A Preface of Imperishable Trifles; but the realization that I had begun in that manner--a suspicious circ.u.mstance in a novel,--where no shadow of an explanation, a justification, was permissible, led me to put it away. It was the serious defect of the novel that it commonly resembled the mechanism of an ingenious lock in which the key turned smoothly for the flinging open, at the appropriate moment, of a door upon a tableau of justice. It lacked almost entirely the fatalities of sheer chance, of inconsiderable accidents, which gave life its characteristic insecurity.
I had left the Hotel de Luz for echoing stone galleries and streets and empty paved plazas when I told myself that mine would have simply been a story of s.h.i.+fted emphasis, for which I should have used my own memories, since I recalled the wallpaper of a music room after thirty years more clearly than the details of my father's death, happening when I was practically mature. The unavoidable conclusion of this was that the paper, in a way I made no pretence to explain, bore upon me more deeply than my father; and, with that in view, it was perhaps as well that the story had remained unwritten.
Some of these considerations returned to my mind the following afternoon, when my fancy had been captured by a woman on a balcony of the Malecon. The house was small, crushed between two imposing structures that had been residences but were now apartments, scarcely two stories and set back of the line, with the balcony at a lower window. The woman was neither young nor lovely, but, folded in a shawl, it might have been one of the lost mantillas, she was invested with a melancholy dignity. It was possible, in the briefest pa.s.sage, to see not only her history but the story of a decade, of a vanished greatness lingering through a last afternoon before extinction--a gesture of Spain finally submerged in the western seas of skepticism.
I was extraordinarily grateful to her for standing wrapped with the shawl in immobile sadness. That was all I wanted from her, the most indeed, she could give: apart from the balcony, hurrying along the street with the black lace drawn closely about her head, she would have been meaningless. The hour in which I saw her, too, the swiftly fading radiance, had its inevitable part in the effect she produced. I had, I realized, no wish to restore her to either youth or happiness, I didn't want to improve her, or the case of Spain, in any way; she was perfect for my purpose, so eminently selfish, as she was. In begging, in imagination, the women of Havana to remain on their balconies, I hadn't given a thought to their welfare or desires.
The truth was that I regarded them as a part of their iron grilling, figures on a canvas, the balconies and women inseparable from each other. It might well be that this was no more than the intolerable oppression of the past incongruously thrust upon the present, and that at any minute the women, in righteous indignation and revolt, would step down into life. But if they were to do that, I hoped it would be put off until I had returned to the land of the feminine free; I didn't want to be present when the balconies were definitely deserted for the publicity of the Sevilla. I should regret their loss heavily, those points of vantage gracefully ranged across the brilliant facades of Havana. For there was no other city where balconies were so universal, so varied, and so seductive. I recalled a balcony high over the Rond Point de Plain-palais, in Geneva, where, on the left, could be seen the blue line of the Jura and on the right, through the mounting Rue de Carouge, the abrupt green cliff of the Salve. Curiously, there were a great many balconies in Geneva giving on many beautiful prospects--the Promenade des Bastions and La Treille, the Cite and bridged water; but they were no more than pleasant, they had no deep significance whatever.
The balconies of Charleston were rather galleries turned privately on gardens and not upon the streets; while those over the banquettes of New Orleans, of the vieux carre, had long ago been emptied of their flowered muslins.
The popularity of balconies, their purpose, had remained, until now at least, largely unchanged in Havana. On Sol Street, in the neighborhood of Oficios and where it met the harbor, they solidly terminated their tall windows, reached the heights of discreet tradition. There the way was so narrow that a head above must be bent forward to see what was pa.s.sing, affording a clear view of high comb and bright lips, provocative in the intimacy of their suggestion. The balconies of the Malecon looked out, conversely, across the unbroken tide of the sea--in the afternoon, when it was fair, a magical sweep of unutterable blue.
Yet they had suffered a decline--as though the constant noise of automobiles had rent an evanescent spirit.
The women there might see, as they chose, either the parade of fas.h.i.+on or the grey walls and the far horizon; but from the balconies of the Prado only the former was visible, the whirling motor cars and the pedestrians in the rows of India laurels. Here the balconies through the early and late evening were crowded; the chatter, the gesticulations and smiles, evident on the street. The clothes, however, were no longer Spanish in characteristic detail, but Parisian; while the essential atmosphere, the color, of the balconies remained. In carnival--I had just missed it--they were hung with serpentine and exchanged bombardments of roses and compliments with the street; but now their fastness, except to the flutter of a hand, was absolute.
I saw a group of girls at an impressive window of the Prado, on the corner of either Trocadero or Colon Street, all in white except for the clear scarlet of one, like a blazing camellia among gardenias; and, for a day after, their dark loveliness stayed in my mind. They had had tea, probably, in the corner of a high cool room with a marble floor, furnished in pale gilt. I had no doubt that a piano had been played for a brief explanatory dancing, the trial of new steps neither French nor Spanish, but American. Some of them, I knew, had been at school in New York--probably Miss Spence's, where balconies were not cultivated--and I wondered what they thought about the Havana to which they had returned.
Well, if the Cuban men, the fathers and suitors and husbands, preferred to keep the historic architecture of their society, of their climate, a convent of some Sacred Heart would be wiser than a celebrated American finis.h.i.+ng school.
The New York scene, however carefully veiled and chaperoned, was a disquieting preparation for the Prado, or even Vedado. What the life on an estancia was, I couldn't imagine; I had been told that, for a woman, oftener than not, it was still a model of Castilian rigidity. It had, in fact, been suggested to me that I write the story of such a girl, shut away from everything that she had been permitted to see and desire.
Unquestionably a splendid subject, one of the vessels that would hold everything an ability could pour into it. I realized at once which, in that individual struggle, must conquer--the heredity of Cuba would be more powerful than an isolated feminine need. The other women, the elders, who surrounded her, would be as relentless as any husband, and in the end she'd become fat and listless.
Widely different balconies held my attention--on one, flooded with the morning sun, two women with carnation cheeks and elaborately dressed hair, but for the rest strikingly informal, laughed an invitation to me that took no account of the hour. They were, I suppose, tawdry, the cheap familiars of a cheap street; but the gay orange wall where they lounged like the painted actors of a zarzuela, their yellow satin slippers and shoulders impudently bare above chemises pink and blue, all gave them a certain distinction. Again, in the section of Jesus del Monte, there were buildings brilliantly and impossibly painted, usually with cafes on the ground, whose balconies, exposed to an intolerable heat, overlooked dingy sun-baked fields. They were always empty.... I could never imagine their use--for there was not only nothing to see, but no one to be seen by. The houses of Havana, admirable in the closeness of the city, possible in a bougainvillia-smothered suburb, were depressingly inappropriate to any contact with the country. They were lost, detached or strayed away from their fellows; for the happy plan of the country house was that of exposure to all the favorable winds that blew, to verandas and open halls rather than balconies and patios: it was merged into vistas and not relentlessly and jealously shut on every face.
A fact that had nothing to do with the tropics or the outskirts of Havana, where wide dusty stone avenues dropped abruptly in soft roads, and the balconies were added purely from habit. My own balcony, at the Hotel Inglaterra, was ideally placed, with its command of an angle of the Parque Central. I often sat there before dinner, or past the middle of night; there was always, then, a wind stirring over San Rafael Street; but the balconies on either side of me, above and below, were invariably empty, their purpose, it was plain, mistrusted.