Part 3 (2/2)
The patios of Havana, turned so uncompromisingly from the street, were, perhaps for that reason, even more engaging than the balconies. I saw them, except those of the government buildings and others semi-public, through opening or half open doors, or sometimes I looked down into them from superior heights. They, too, were countless in variety, from the merest kitchen areas and places of heaped refuse to lovely garden rooms of flowers and glazed tiling and fountains. This sense of privacy, of enclosure, in a garden was their most charming feature; and the possibilities and implications of a patio created a whole social life with which I was necessarily unfamiliar. They were, usually, in the hours I knew them, empty but for pa.s.sing servants ... obviously their time was late afternoon or evening: fixed to the inner walls were the iron brackets of lamps, and it was easy to imagine them dimly lighted and flooded with perfume, with the scent of magnolias and the whisper of the fountains.
These details, separately, were not rare, but shut into the masonry of Havana, their beauty shown in momentary glimpses on streets of blank walls, their fragrance drooping into unexpected barren places, the patios stirred my inherent desires. As usual, I didn't want to be gazing at them from without, but to be a part of their existence: I wanted to sleep on one, in a room nothing but a stone gallery, or watch the moonlight slip over the leaves of the c.r.a.pe myrtles and the tiles and sink into the water. But not to-day, for there were discordant sounds through the arches with slender twisted Moorish pillars--the subdued harshness of mechanical music, the echoes of that dissatisfaction which was everywhere now recognized as improvement. I demanded guitars.
The masculine chords of the guitar, the least sentimental of instruments, as the Spaniards were the least sentimental of people, the deep vibration of resinous stopped strings, was the perfect accompaniment to that color visible and invisible. Invisible! Always that, first and most potent. The perpetuity of atmosphere through transmitted feeling was far more absorbing than the other chimera, of incorruption. It was tradition, more than moonlight, that steeped the patios with kindled obscure romantic longings. Within their formal squares they held the spirit of a great history and of two great races, two continents. They, the patios, were the East in the West, the Moroscos on the Peninsula.
The dress of the present, even the floating films of the women, was misplaced; these were, in reality, the courtyards of the Orient, and they needed the dignity of grave robes and gestures, bearded serenity.
In them, initially, women had been flowers lightly clasped with bands of rubies and dyed illusory veils; there had been no guitars then, but silver flutes. However, I had no desire to be a part of that time; it was Spain that possessed me, and not in Grenada but Cuba, during the Captain-generals.h.i.+p of the Conde de Ricla, in the seventeen sixties when the British conquests under Albemarle were returned to the island.
That was a period of building and prosperity, the fortifications of San Carlos and Atares were established, Morro and the Cabanas refas.h.i.+oned, and the streets and houses of Havana named and numbered. The decline of Spain, a long imperceptible crumbling, had already begun, but its effect was not visible in Cuba; there still was a Castilian arrogance burned more brown, more vivid, by the Caribbean.
A little late for the plate s.h.i.+ps sailing in cloudy companies and filling Havana with the swords of Mexico and Peru; but my mind and inclinations were not heroic; I could dispense with Pizarro's soldiers, fanciful with the ornaments of the Incas, for the quiet of walled gardens, the hooped brocades of court dresses; all the transplanted grace of the city and hour. Climate was greater than man, and the first Cubenos, dead in the mines of Cobre, were being revenged for the usurpation of their happiness and land; the negroes of the slave trade, too, were repaying their chains to the last link of misery. But these counter influences were not perceptible yet in the patios, just as the French Revolution had still to scatter the polite pastorals only to survive in the canvases of Boucher and Watteau.
It was, in Havana as well as Seville, the farewell of true formality, for after that it became only a form. No one, afterwards, was to bow instinctively as he left a room or dance to the measures of Beethoven and Mozart. A useless plant cut down by a rusty scythe! The elegance of Cuba, however, changing into later Victorianism, was, in the time of de Ricla, greatly enhanced by its surrounding, by the day before yesterday when there had been only thatched bohios where now were patios of marble. Those quiet s.p.a.ces were sentient with all this, just as the patios of the churches held the sibilant whisper of the sandals of the Inquisition, an order already malodorous and expelled from the island by Antonio Maria Bucarely, the following Captain-general.
But even yet it would be possible, with the details carefully arranged, to find an emotional situation in a patio undisturbed since the middle eighteenth century; for the revenge of the Cubenos and of Africa, of the red and the black slaves, was that, with the faint or full infusion of their bloods into their conquerors, dwindled unintelligible desires and dreamlike pa.s.sions entered as well. A discoloration of the mind as actual as the darkening of the skin! And I pictured an obscure impulse buried in the personality of a sensitive and reserved man, such a trait as, at moments of extreme pressure, would betray him into a hateful savagery; or it might be better brought out by a galling secret barbarity of taste. The Spain of Philip, primitive Africa, and a virginal island race constrained into one body and spirit must be richly dramatic.
It was imperative to regard the patios in such a light, with a strong infusion of reality, for, half apprehended, they produced that thin tinkling note of sham romance; they evoked, for a ready susceptibility, the impressions of opera bouffe ... a danger constantly present in my thoughts. As it was, I should be accused again of avoiding the actual and the difficult for an easy unreality; but there was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid back in point of time--no one had charged me with an historical novel.
There was another, perhaps safer, att.i.tude toward the balconies and patios of Havana: to regard them in an unrelieved mood of realism, to show them livid with blue paint and echoing with shrill misery, typhoid fever, and poverty. If I did that, automatically a number of serious critical intellects would give me their withheld support, they would no longer regard me as a bright cork floating thoughtlessly over the opaque depths of life. Well, they could--they'd have to--go to the devil; for I had my own honesty to serve, my own plot to tend--a plot, as I have said, where, knowing the effort hopeless, I tried only to grow a flower spray. If I could put on paper an apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of the apples.
Or, in Havana, of the oranges. In the meanwhile the patios gave me an inexhaustible pleasure. Sometimes the walls were glazed with tiles and the octagonal surface of the fountain held the reflected tracery of bamboo, while a royal palm towered over the bal.u.s.ters of the roof and hanging lamps were crowned with fretted metal. Another, with its flags broken and the basin dry, was deserted except for the soundless flame-like pa.s.sage of chromatic lizards; still another was bare, with solid deep arcades and shadows on the ground and a second gallery of gracefully light arches. There was, in one, a lawn-parasol in candy-colored stripes with low wicker chairs and gay cus.h.i.+ons; on a table some tall gla.s.ses elbowed a syphon, English gin, and a silver dish of limes, and a blue-and-yellow macaw was secured to a black lacquer stand.
That, evidently, was not characteristic of Havana, and yet the city absorbed it, made it a part of a complex richness, a complexity as brilliantly blended as a rainbow. At first I had been entranced by the sudden colorful display, it had seemed to be in one marvellously high key; but now I recognized that it was composed of the entire scale, and that there were notes profoundly dark. I should have known that, for I had been, when I was much younger, a painter, and I had learned that surfaces which seemed to be in one tone were made up of a hundred. The city, of course, was an acc.u.mulation of the men who had made it, the women who had lived there; and it was possible that Havana had as intense and varied a foundation as any place that had existed.
Not in the sense, the historical importance of, for example, Athens; I had already said that Havana was a city without history, which was true in the c.u.mulative, inter-human meaning of that term. But it had, within its limits, on its island like a flower in air, an amazing and absorbing past. In the beginning, where Spain was concerned, Cuba, a fabulous land, had promised fabulous gold; but the empires of the Aztecs and Peru, incalculably richer, and the fatal dream of eternal youth in Florida, had robbed it of royal interest, of men, food, and s.h.i.+ps. It had settled back, lost to most concern beyond a perfunctory colonial administration, into a region of agriculture, affected only indirectly by, and affecting not at all, the universal upheaval elsewhere. Within Havana itself, then, moulded by the burning sun, the cooling night winds, and the severing water, a peculiarly essential human development had taken place. And its history was, for this reason, elusive, most difficult to grasp; hopelessly concealed from a mere examination of bastions.
One by one the colors of its fantastic design grew clearer to me; period by period the streets and people became intelligible, until they reached the middle-century era to which I was so susceptible. To arrive, with the ingredients of a tropical Spain and the pirates of the world, at an early Victorianism was a mystery which demanded a close investigation.
That air enveloped all the center of the city, its paseos and plazas and buildings, and still influenced the social life. This, I finally decided, came from the fact that the architectural spirit which dominated Havana was of the period before Eastlake; or at least I was not familiar with any structures erected in such a style, so lavishly marble, since then.
There was no absence of modernity in the wharfs and streets, but that loud impetuous tide poured through the ways of a quieter water, and in the side pa.s.sages the sound diminished. Havana was a great port, but the steam s.h.i.+pping along its waterfront was incongruous with the low tranquil whiteness, the pseudo-cla.s.sicism, of the buildings that held along the bay. The latter particular, elaborated from my first impression, carried the city back to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. I had no intention of examining the dates of numerous structures, but the stamp of their time was on the Ionic entablatures. Then women, as well, had copied in their dress the symbol of the Greek column, of sculpture instead of painting, except for the charming and illogical innovation of turbans; and they went about in sandals and gowns falling straight from their looped b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
Such a figure, with her head bound in vermilion, must have been enticing in the great shaded bare rooms. There must have been, too, an extraordinary a.s.semblage of negro pages and majordomos in ruby silks and canary and velvet.
The feminine silhouette changed remarkably in thirty years, from a column to a cone, from the ultimate in flowing lines to a bouquet-like rigidity; and the severity of furnis.h.i.+ngs, of incidentals, expanded in queer elaborations. It was, notably, a period of prudery, of all which, objectively, I disliked; while at the same time there had been the undercurrent of license that always accompanied an oppressive hypocrisy.
This, I could see, was true of its age in Havana: men--the real prudes--had been heavily whiskered at home with a repressed morality, and betrayed in another quarter by heredity and the climate. Two periods that, except for some beautiful books, had been steeped in an ugliness from which the world had not recovered. Indeed, while it was now fas.h.i.+onable to deride them, the present was, in some ways, perceptibly worse: Literature was, perhaps, bolder in scope, but it showed hardly more than a surprise at the sound of its comparative liberty of speech.
The art of painting had burst into frantic fragments that might or might not later be a.s.sembled into meaning; the architecture had degenerated into nothing more than skilful or stupid adaptation.
In the large disasters that were sweeping the world, the mad confusion of injustice and revolt, of contending privilege, the serene primness of Havana, its starched formality of appearance, offered a priceless quietude. It was, at once, static and mobile, a place of countless moods that merged at the turning of a corner, the s.h.i.+fting of a glance from La Punta to the circular bandstand at the foot of the Prado. Never pedantic, it was a city more for the emotions than the intellect; intellect, in its astigmatic conceit, had largely overlooked Havana; and Havana had missed little enough. Its monuments and statues, where they were complacently innocent of art, had been brought into harmony of tone by the atmosphere vivid like the flambeau trees, the inconceivable blueness of its sea. The colors of the houses, glaringly or palely inappropriate, were melted and bound into inevitable rightness. Even the cemetery, frosted with tombs like a monstrous iced cake, its shafts that might have been the crystallized stalagmites of the caves of death, resembled nothing more disturbing than the lacy pantalets of the time it celebrated. It was the final accomplishment of mid-Victorian horror, with its pit of mouldering bones and solemn ritualistic nonsense; yet the thought of the ponderous gold and black catafalques rolling in procession between the horizontal white slabs, of the winking candles--all the ghastly appendages of religious undertaking--and the clergy in purple and fine cambric, with amethyst rings on their fat or their thin fingers, gave it the feeling of a remote mummery.
The cemetery from which I escaped with relief and the cafe that I entered with pleasure--again the Telegrafo--flowed together in the city's general impression. I could see the statue of Marti, and, as I looked, it changed into the statue of Isabel; then that, too, vanished.
The broad paved avenue, the flagged walks, became a gravelled plaza about which the girls promenaded in one direction to pa.s.s constantly the youths circling in the other. The vision flickered and died, and I went on to lunch through the Havana of so many days smoothly packed into one.
I felt that my first sense of instinctive familiarity had been justified; yet, in the corridor of the Inglaterra, asked by a traveler how to get to a restaurant, the Dos Hermanos, I was unable to reply; and a third American, brus.h.i.+ng me aside, gave him voluble instructions. It ended by his being taken out and seated in a hack, while the other, in angry execrable and fluent Spanish, told the driver where to proceed.
Whatever I had learned, it seemed, was of no practical value; my multiple sensations were not reducible to the simplest demand. A woman pa.s.sed with a copy of an ultra popular novel, and this recalled the long struggle of my early books for the smallest recognition. If that dark frame of mind had fastened on me in the north, it would have burdened me for a day; but in Havana, with the Marquis de Riscal and a Por Larranaga, I envied no mediocre novelist her stereotyped laurels. It was impossible to get anywhere a better wine or a cigar that changed more soothingly from the brown of fact to blue fancy.
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