A marked, not to say sensational, transformation of my own person had been a conspicuous part of that young imaginary business; for, though I was fat and clumsy, I managed to see myself tall and engaging, and dark, too; or, anyhow, a figure to beguile a charming girl. Something of that hopeless process had taken place in me once more, now the vainer for the fact that even my youth had gone. The quality which called back a past illusion was very positive in Havana, and my feeling for the city was greatly enriched, further defined. It was charged with hazard for what men like me had dreamed, leaving the actuality for the pretended; the pretended, that so easily became the false, was, in Havana, real.
The Obispo under its striped awnings, with its merchandise of coral and high combs and pineapple cloths; the women magnetic with a Spain that had slept with the East, the South; the bright blank walls, lemon yellow, blue, rose; the palms borne against the sky on trunks like dulled pewter; the palpable sense of withdrawn dark mystery, all created an atmosphere of a too potent seductiveness. The street ended in the Plaza de Armas, with the ultramarine sea beyond; and as I sat, facing the arched low buff façade of the President's Palace, my brain was filled with vivid fragments of emotion.
What suddenly I realized about Havana, the particular triumph of its miraculous vitality, was that it had never, like so much of Italy, degenerated into a museum of the past, it was not in any aspect mortuary. Its relics of the conquistadores were swept over by the flood of to-day. Yet I began to be vaguely conscious of the history of Cuba, of that Cuba from which Cortez had set sail, in the winter of fifteen hundred and nineteen, for Mexico. Later this would, perhaps, become clearer to me; not pedantically, but because the spirit of that early time was still alive. I made no effort to direct my mind into deep channels. What must come must come; and if it were a gin rickey rather than the slavery of the repartimento system, I'd be little enough disturbed.
The gin rickey proved to be an immediate reality, in the patio of the Inglaterra—a stream of silver bubbles shot into a glass where an emerald lime floated vivaciously. I had no intention of going out again until the shadows of the late afternoon had lengthened far toward the white front of the Gomez-Mena building across the plaza; and after lunch I went up to the quiet of my room. I should, certainly, write no letters, read—idly—none of the few books published about Cuba, which were on my table; and I began the essays of James Huneker called Bedouins. His rhapsodies over Mary Garden, as colorful in style as the glass above the window, I soon dropped and picked indifferently among the novels that remained. A poor lot—the thin current stream of American fiction, doubly pale in Havana.
The day wheeled from south to west. I was perfectly contented to linger doing nothing, scarcely thinking, in the subdued and darkened heat. There was a heavy passage of trunks through the echoing hall without, the melancholy calling of the evening papers rose on the air; I was enveloped in the isolation of a strange tongue. To sit as still as possible, as receptive as possible, to stroll aimlessly, watch indiscriminately, was the secret of conduct in my situation. Nothing could be planned or provided for. The thing was to get enjoyment from what I did and saw; what benefit I should receive, I knew from long experience, would be largely subconscious. I had been in Havana scarcely more than a day, and already I had collected a hundred impressions and measureless pleasure. How wise I had been to come ... extravagantly, with—as it were—a flower in my coat, a gesture of protest, of indifference, to all that the world now emphasized.
* * *
However, the tranquillity of the afternoon was sharply interrupted by my going, unexpectedly, to the races at Oriental Park. I had to dress with the utmost rapidity, leaving the choice of a tie to chance, for the dun car of the United States Military Attaché was waiting for me. The Attaché, handsomely bearing the brown seal of Philippine campaigns, abstracted in manner, sat forward with an imperturbable military chauffeur, while the back of the car was flooded by the affable speech of a Castilian marquis whose variety of experience in the realms of expert and dangerous games had been limited only by their known forms. It was unquestionably the mixture of my commonplace Presbyterian blood and incurable habit of romance that gave me a distinct satisfaction in my surroundings. I was glad that the Marquis was what he was and that he held a trans-continental motor record; it pleased my honest democratic instincts when other cars were held back for our progress; and, finally, the deep chairs on the veranda of the Jockey Club were precisely right for a lounging afternoon in an expensive sporting atmosphere.
The race track seemed to me long—was it a mile?—and, with the horses at a starting post across from the grandstand, I couldn't tell one from another. The grandstand was on the right, and beyond the park were low monotonous lines of stables. It had been raining, the track was heavy, and the race that followed the blowing of a bugle covered the silk of the jockeys with mud. My pleasure, as always, slowly subsided at the persistent intrusion of an inner destructive questioning. Incontestably the racing, the horses lining fretfully and scrambling through the muddy pools, left me cold. The sweep of the Jockey Club, too, was comparatively empty of interest; the spectators there, though they were more or less intent upon the results posted on the board opposite, were not the immemorial onlookers at such affairs of sweepstakes, selling plates and furloughs.
The Cuban women present, elaborately dressed for shaded lawns and salons de thé, were largely foreign to the wide-spread open spectacle. I remembered English races where groups of dukes with ruddy features, in rough tweeds, sat through drizzling afternoons on their iron-shod seat ricks, and women of title, in waterproofs and harsh brogues, tramped through the sloshing turf ... an attitude far removed from Havana. A group of royal palms, lifted in the middle distance, alone gave the races an exotic air; though they were, of course, promoted and ridden by Americans, and their mechanics were quite those which operated in New Orleans and Butte and Baltimore. Now I was annoyed because I had, thoughtlessly, come; I might as well have gone to the baseball game in what had formerly been the bull ring.
Yet I could retire to my speculations for escape, and I thought how peculiarly modern outdoor games, sport, belong to the British—to them and their relatives beyond the sea. I remembered, in this connection, the story of a French vicomte I knew, a man of imposing build, who, in yellow gloves, shot field larks attracted by the flashing of a mirror manipulated by his valet. Le sport! But the Spaniards, bred to the delicate agility of bull fighting, trained in endurance on the inconceivably fast pelota courts, were more athletic than the French; though, as a race, they were inclined to delegate their games to professionals. The sporting amateur, in spite of the Marquis, was a rarity; rather they chose to be lookers-on at brilliant diversions which retained an appreciable amount of a mediæval cruelty diversified from our own brutal strain.