Meantime, Creole and negro waiters are bringing in breakfast to the adjoining room, which, is partitioned from the airy courtyard only by high arches and pillars. Every thing looks temptingly fresh and clean,—quite the reverse of all we have heard of the filth and bad cooking of Cuba. Fried fruits in great variety, numerous mosaics from the animal, vegetable, and I know not what kingdoms of nature, of which I can only remember the name picadille, vary the bill of fare. Café au lait comes in after breakfast is over.
Night.—All day guns have been firing, flags flying from balconies, windows, and housetops, and endless preparations for a grand illumination to-night in honor of the victory.
This afternoon we took the steam ferry across the bay, to get a view of the harbor decked with its flags, and to see the sugar storehouses on the other shore.
This is our first sight of coolies in native costume and usual Cuban occupation. They look not only small, but weak, and extremely feminine in face and form. They are mostly naked to the waist, where some sort of a sash confines short loose trousers, and, in the boys, nothing at all. The faces, more cheerful and adroit in expression than those of the negroes, are of a brown reddish hue, as if the light came upon them from a bright copper sun.
To-night we walked to the Plaza de Armas. It is filled with trees, four of them palms, and with blooming flowers, mostly large, brilliant, odorless, and unknown to me. During all this time, the band played sweetly from the opera of Lucia de Lammermoor, and swarthy, moustached and cigared men, and gaudily-dressed and ill-walking ladies, promenaded round and round the walks, while their carriages waited outside the gates.
How opaque are these faces! The outside is well enough, admirably chiselled and toned, but it does not hint of anything behind. They too often lack the only beautiful features that can be in a man’s face,—intellect and sensibility. I wonder where Cuban people keep their souls! Yet for all that, this is a scene of enchantment,—the intense light in those stars, buried so deep in the intense blue; the dazzling brightness of the vertical moon, that makes everybody walk upon his own shadow; the pure breeze, coming fresh from over the sea; the many lights from the palace balconies, revealing high, open windows, and through them gay forms and foreign aspects.
Friday, March 2.—This morning stayed in my room to rest, for I have commenced with too large doses of the tropics. But who can rest in the midst of thunderings like these,—guns, bands of music, shouts of rejoicing? I hope the Spaniards will not gain any more victories over the Moors until I get away from them.
This evening my first ride in a volante. Cuba is more Spanish than Spain itself: for here we have the quaint, the characteristic Spain; the Spain as it was when Don Quixote created it and was created by it; the Spain isolated; the Spain which Paris and European civilization have little touched or tainted; the Spain which, in want of religion, has the absence of progression. But these grotesque volantes! They strike me as something saved whole out of the general change and wreck of the past. They consist of two long shafts, with a little low-seated and low-topped kind of a tête-à-tête at one end, which usually contains three bright, gauzy clouds, enveloping three plump, dark-eyed ladies in bare head, neck, and arms,—the youngest and prettiest always between and a little in front of the other two. At the other end of the shafts is fastened a minute horse; his tail is carefully braided, and tied with a string to the left side of the saddle, upon which sits, the postillion, in boots and livery. Sometimes a second horse is added, upon which the postillion sits to guide the first; but this is superfluous, and merely, like the rich mountings of silver on the horse and volante, to display the wealth of the owner.
The gait of these horses is peculiar and indescribable. It is not a trot, nor a pace, nor a canter, but a kind of combination of all, and disdainful avoidance of each. It is a parody on quadrupedal peripatetics. They are born to it. It is hereditary. It never entered into the head—or rather feet—of a Cuban Rozinante, that there are horses in the world not orthodox in this mode of locomotion. It gives the rider, too, the most ridiculous motion imaginable,—as if the saddle were a cushion, but a pin-cushion, with the pins stuck the wrong way.
Mr. S——, who accompanied us, said, on our return, that, when paying the callisero, he asked him if he had an escudo in change. “Oh, yes!” said the darkey, and took the coin out of his ear.