Part 4 (1/2)

The Cuban cigarettes, however, were too strong for pleasure; for, while the preference for a strong cigar was admissible, cigarettes should be mild. All those famous were. Strangely enough, good cigarettes had never been smoked in the United States, a land with an overwhelming preference for the cheap drugged tobacco called Virginia. No one would pay for a pure Turkish leaf; with the exception of a few hotels and clubs it was not procurable. There was a merchant on the Zulueta with a large a.s.sortment of Cuban cigarettes, made in every conceivable shape and paper, hebra and arroz and pectoral. They had tips of gilt or silver paper, cork, straw, and colored silks, and were packed in enticing ways and odd numbers. But, after trying their apparent variety, they all seemed alike, as coa.r.s.e and black in flavor as their tobacco.

There were, of course, men who disagreed with me--though women never liked a Cabanas or Henry Clay cigarette--and a connection of mine, a judge, long imported from Cuba, through Novotny of New York, the Honoradez tobacco for his cigarettes. He had been in Havana during the Spanish occupation, and later; and, recalling him, I could see that he, like myself, possessed an ineradicable fondness for it. In his case, even, his memories might have affected his exterior, for he had a lean darkness more appropriate to the Calzada del Cerro than to Chester County. In summer particularly, with his immaculate linens, and the brown cigarette casting a pungent line of smoke from his long sensitive fingers, he was the image of a Spanish colonial gentleman.

He had known Havana at a better time than now, when it was more provincial, simpler; the hotels then were uncompromisingly locked at ten in the evening, and if he returned later he was forced to call the negro sleeping in the hall. I don't remember where he stayed--probably at the Inglaterra. I was young and ignorant of Cuba when I saw him, with a certain frequency, before he died; and I heard his talk about the Parque Central with no greater interest than his discussions of salmon fis.h.i.+ng, of Sun and Planet reels and rods split and glued. I realized sharply what I had missed, both in the way of detail--the detail most important to a mental picture and always missing--and in intimate understanding of Cuban affairs. For he had a tonic mind, rare in America, unsentimental and courageous, and touched with a satirical quality disastrous to sham, social, religious, or political.

The cigarettes came to him in bright tin boxes of a hundred; and, after his death, I bought seven from Novotny and smoked the contents almost by way of memorial; for he was a personality of a type almost gone. Judges of County Courts no longer wore immaculate high hats to the Bench, with the vivid corner of a bandanna handkerchief visible in the formality of their coat tails.

The silk-tipped cigarettes were for women, but the silk was princ.i.p.ally a villainous carmine, a color fatal to the delicate charm of lips, and I hoped that I should see none so thoughtless as to smoke them; while the cigarettes all of tobacco were, frankly, impossible. Why, I couldn't say; they simply wouldn't do. What women I saw smoking in public, in the cafes and at the races, were not Cubans. They, on view, neither smoked nor drank anything but refrescos. But a different feminine world, at their doors or over the counters of bodegas, enjoyed long formidable cigars.

An amusing convention, a prejudice really; an act, in women, condemned from the a.s.sociations in men's minds, synonymous with that gaiety they so painstakingly kept out of their homes. Yet, in spite of them, women smoking had become a commonplace in the United States. In Havana men were still paramount ... and Victorian. On the Obispo cigarette-cases from Toledo, of steel inlaid with gold, were for sale; but I'd had experience with Toledo work--the steel rusted. For years I'd bought cigarette cases and holders before I finally learned that the former were a nuisance and that the latter destroyed the flavor of tobacco. I had owned cases in metal and leather and silk, patented and plain, and one by one they were mislaid and given away. I had smoked with holders of ivory and jet and tortoise sh.e.l.l, wood and amber and quills, and they, too, had disappeared. All that could be said for them was that they looked well and saved the fingers from nicotine stains.

The Turkish cigarettes in Havana were unremarkable, yet, for the Cuban youth, the sign of worldliness. They disdained the local brands, but even Cuba was powerless to depreciate her cigars, the best of all countries and all times. Here was an accomplishment, a possession, of unique importance and excellence, for tobacco belonged to the irreducible number of necessities. I had survived prohibition, with the a.s.sistance of a forethought unhappily limited in execution; but if the absurdity of my country abolished tobacco, I should be forced to move to England; that would be too much. I could imagine, in this case, what comments would appear in the press, reminding the virtuous and patriotic that my books had always been chargeable with immorality and a blindness to the splendor of our national ideals.

In the past I had suffered a particularly wretched nervous breakdown--it hit me like a bullet in the Piazza della Principe in Florence; and when I had politely been sent to Switzerland to die, an English doctor at Geneva cured me, for most practical purposes, by impatience, black coffee, and Shepherd's Hotel cigarettes. I had no doubt that smoking was, in many ways, a very deleterious habit; but life itself was a bad habit condemned to the worst of ends. I was, as well, very apt to have little in common with men who didn't smoke, or, I should say, with men who had never smoked. They were, with practically no exceptions, precisians, and ate, lived, for their health rather than for the tang of delicate sauces and sensations. And a long while ago a wise and charming woman had lamented to me the fact that all the generosity and attractiveness she met in men belonged to what were colloquially called drunks.... Her feeling was the same as mine.

I wasn't defending drunkenness or attacking the statistics against smokers; what I felt, I think, in such men was the presence of a fallibility to which, at awkward or tragic moments, they yielded and so became companions of sorrow and charity, the great temperers of humanity. At any rate, I demanded enough liberty, at least, to fill my system with smoke if I willed. The possibility that my act might hurt someone else failed to excite me--why should I bother with him when I wasn't concerned about myself! There was too much officious paternalism in the air, too many admonitions and not enough lightness of heart--of tobacco heart if necessary.

In addition, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be perfectly sanitary in mind and body, any more than I was certain of the complete desirability of a perfected world, of heaven. At once, there, my lifelong occupation would be gone--novelists never stopped to think what would happen to them if all the reforms for which they shouted should go into effect; and I had a disturbing idea that a great deal of my pleasure in life came from feelings not always admissible in, shall I say, magazines of a general character. A clean mind and a pure heart were not without chilling suggestions of emotional sterility. Since men had hopelessly and forever departed from the decency of simple animals, I wanted to enjoy the silken and tulle husks that remained. If there was a sedative in cigars, an illusion in a Daiquiri c.o.c.ktail, I proposed to enjoy it at the expense of a problematic month or year more of life always open to the little accidents of pneumonia or spoiled milk or motors.

What might be called the minor pleasures of life, though in their bulk were vastly more important than the great moments, Havana had carried to a high state of perfection; yet with, where I was concerned, an exception not in favor of the theatre. I went, as I had determined, to whatever offered, swept along by the antic.i.p.ation of Spanish dancing and music: the first was immeasurably the best in existence, and I liked the harsh measures of Spanish melody, both the native songs of the countryside and the sophisticated arrangements by Valverde. A great many skilful writers had described the dancing, and their accounts were well enough, but, politely, they all lacked the fundamental brutality of the jota and malaguena, just as the foreign operatic variations on Spanish themes were reminted in a smooth and debased universal coin.

I purchased a ridiculously flimsy sc.r.a.p of paper, which, I was a.s.sured, made me the possessor of a grille princ.i.p.al at the Pairet Theatre--a box, as huge as it was bare, within the stage. I could see, under the hood, the long dramatic hand of the prompter waving to the droning monotony of his voice through the stupidest performance I remembered. It was, by turn, a comedy, a farce, a pantomime, and a comic opera, and a complete ill.u.s.tration of the evils of departing from national tradition and genius--a dreary attempt at the fusion of Vienna and New York, planned, obviously, for a cosmopolitan public superior to the rude familiar strains of gypsies.

At intervals a chorus of young women, whose shrill excitement belied their patent solidity, made an incongruous appearance and declamation; they grouped themselves in feeble designs, held for a moment of scattered applause, and went off with a labored lightness that threatened even their ankles. This was bad, but a revista--I could think of nothing else to call it--at the Marti was, because it was so much better, worse. There I had an ordinary palco, enclosed by a railing from the promenade and elevated above the body of an audience composed of every possible shade from fairest noon to unrelieved midnight. The evening was divided into two performances, for the second of which, Arco-Iris, a largely increased price was demanded. This was, again, Vienna and Broadway, but with, in addition, an elaboration of color and lighting ultra-modern in intent.

I had seen the same effort ten years before in Paris, and the failure was as marked in Spanish as in French. Mr. Ziegfield, a.s.sisted by the glittering beauty of the girls he was able to secure, had made such spectacles brilliantly and inimitably his own. The Latins knew nothing, really, about legs: they showed them with what was no more than a perfunctory bravado, while it was a peculiarity of shoulders--the art of which they so daringly comprehended--that their effect was lost in ma.s.s. The display, the extravagant settings and costumes, of Arco-Iris, were, throughout, mechanical; the coryphees were painfully aware of their dazzlements; and an Andalusian number, looked forward to with weary eagerness, had been deprived of every rude and vigorous suggestion of its origin.

When I returned to the Inglaterra I demanded of a clerk where I could find a vulgar performance of, for instance, the habanera, but he shook his head doubtfully. At intervals, he admitted, Spanish dancers came to the National Theatre; but--his manner brightened--Caruso was expected in May. I had no intention of staying in Havana through May; and, had I been there, I'd have avoided Caruso ... a singer murdered by the Victrola. Already the seats for his concerts were a subject for speculation, and it was clear that they would reach a gigantic price, between forty and sixty dollars for a single place in the orchestra. In this depressing manner Havana made it evident that it was a city both fas.h.i.+onable and rich.

There had been a time, too, I was informed, when all the uncensored moving pictures of the world found a home in Cuba; pictures where embraces were not limited to a meagre number of feet, nor layettes, the entire ramifications of procreation, prohibited. But these were gone from the general view. The films, though, had not been destroyed, and for some hundreds of dollars a private performance might be arranged.

But this I declined. The moving picture industry had been brought entirely from America, the theatres plastered with Douglas Fairbanks'

set grin, William Farnum's pasty heroics, and Mary Pickford's invaluable aspect of innocence. Never, in the time I was in Cuba, did I see a Spanish actor or film announced; although a picture, appropriate to Lent, of the Pa.s.sion, hinted at a different spirit.

I became, then, discouraged by the formal entertainments. As usual, I was too late; the process of improvement had everywhere marched slightly ahead of me, subst.i.tuting for the genuine note a borrowed false emphasis. To-morrow I should hear the Salvation Army bawling in Obispo Street. In a state of indifference I went to Carmelo, a dancing pavilion with an American cabaret, and drifted to the table where the singing and dancing profession were having their inevitable sandwiches and beer. A metallic young person with bra.s.s hair, a tin voice, and a leaden mind, conversed with me in the special social accent of her kind, ready in advance with a withering retort for any licentious proposals. Beside her sat a Mexican with an easy courtesy and an enigmatic past. He was, I gathered, the son of an official who, in one of the exterminating changes of government, had escaped over a wall in his pearl studs and dinner coat but little else.

I liked everything about him but his indulgence for soda blondes; yet in the serious conversation we at once opened--connected with a projected trip of mine to the City of Mexico--we forgot the girl until, exasperated by our neglect, she lost some of her manner in an inane exclamation made, she announced, for the sake of Christ. Her companion immediately returned to his engagement, and I watched the Americans more or less proficient in that dance the name of which had been borrowed from a woman's undergarment. It had begun as a chemise, but what it would end in was problematic.

Was it a healthy rebellion against the prudery of repression or the advent.i.tious excitation of imminent impotence? Whatever had brought it about, it was stupid, an insensate jiggling of the body without frankness or grace. I hadn't yet seen the Cuban rumba, with its black grotesque negrito and sensual mulata; but I was confident that if a rumba were started at Carmelo, the s.h.i.+mmy would resemble the spasmodic vibrations of a frigid St. Vitus dance. The men and women doing it, galvanized by drink and the distance from their responsibilities, animated by the Cuban air, were prodigiously abandoned. They were, mostly, commercial gentlemen and stiff brokers investigating sugar securities, or the genial obese presidents and managers of steams.h.i.+p companies. The presidents, the managers and brokers, were invariably accompanied by their wives, who, for the most part, endeavored to re-create the illusions and fervors of earlier days; but heaven knew from where came the women for whom the representatives of Yankee merchandise were responsible.

Their origins were as mysterious as their age--strange feminine derelicts stranded by temperament and mischance, caught in the destructive web of the tropics. The dresses they wore were either creations or makes.h.i.+fts, but their urbanity was as solidly enamelled as their hair was waved or marcelled. There was still another variety--I had seen them before at expensive fis.h.i.+ng camps--tightly skirted, permanently yellow-haired, with stony faces and superfine diamonds.

Drunk or sober, their calmness was never changed by so much as a flicker; they caught sail fish in the Gulf Stream, danced, ate, talked, and now, certainly, were flying, with the same hard imperturbability and display, in gold mesh bags, of their unlimited crisp money in high denominations--the granite women on the wall of the Gallego Club.

My interest, however, in the American in Havana had vanished, my position in life, avoidance rather than protest, and I surrendered him to the hospitality of Cuba and the gambling concessions. I wanted, from then on, only the local scene: there were cities where the foreigners, the travelers, made an inseparable part of the whole, but this was not true of Havana; it remained, in spite of the alien clamor, singularly undisturbed, intact, in essence. But a few streets, a plaza or two, knew the sound of English, and beyond these the voices, the stores, the preoccupations, were without any recognition of other people or needs. I began to wander farther from the cafes of the Parque Central, the open familiarity of the sea, and found myself in situations where, in my lack of Spanish, I was limited to the simplest, most plastic, desires.

It was in this manner that I found ear-rings which I secured with a sense of treasure--they were in the shop of a woman who sold embroidered linen from Madeira and the Canary Islands, lying haphazard in the lid of a paste-board box. The patio opened directly from the front room, the store, an informal a.s.semblage of dull white folded cloths and frothy underclothes, and outside a very large family indeed was eating the noon breakfast while a pinkly naked pointer dog lay on the cool tiles with his feet extended stiffly upward.