The automobiles on the Malecón multiplied, for the night was hot; soon there was a solid double opposed procession on the broad sweeping drive. This was a triumph of American engineering and, I had no doubt, an improvement on the informality of rocks and débris that had existed before. Yet I should liked to have seen it when the promenade had not yet been laid down with mechanical precision, in, perhaps, the early seventies. Then there were sea baths cut in the live rock at the end of the Paseo Isabel, at the Campos Eliseos, where the water was like a cooler liquid green air, and where, after storms, a foaming surf poured over the barriers. There were no motors then, but volantes and the modern quintrins, with two horses, one outside the shafts, and a riding calesero in vermilion and gold lace; and, latest of all, as new as possible, the victorias.
Neither, then, was the Prado paved, but the trees were infinitely finer—five rows there were in fifty-seven—when the clamor of the city was, in great part, peals of bells. This was a familiar process with me, to leave the present for the past in a mood of irrational regret. But never for the heroic, the real past; the years I chose to imagine lay hardly behind the horizon; in Italy it had been the Risorgimento, at farthest the villeggiatura of Antonio Longo or the viole d'amore of Cimarosa in churches. And now, drinking my champagne on the empty flagged terrace of the Miramar, facing, across the parade of automobiles, the blank curtain of the night, starred on the right by the lights of castellated forts, my mind vibrated with grace notes no longer heard outside the faint distilled sweetness of music boxes.
As if in derision of this, a loud unexpected music rose from the bandstand in the Plaza, and I saw that a flood of people, seated or moving along the pavements and through the lanes of chairs, had gathered. Nothing, I thought, could have delighted me more; but my anticipation was soon smothered by the absurdity of the selections: they were not from Balfé nor Rossini, neither military nor the accented rhythm of Spain ... the opening number was Parsifal, blown into the profound night with a convention of brassy emphasis.
At the total destruction of my pleasure I cursed the pretentious stupidity of the band-master and a great deal else of modern Cuba. I remembered particularly some regrets, locally expressed, that the Spanish domination was no more. Things, it was said, were better ordered then. But this was a position the vainness of which I couldn't join: it was no part of my disposition to combat, or even regret, the inevitable. My course—quite other—was to project myself into periods whose very loss formed most of their charm. Gone, they took on the tender memories of the dead, and were invested with the dignity, the beauty, of a warm fragility.
Two girls were now seated at a table by the entrance, and, though they were alone for the moment, it was evident that they had no intention of remaining in that unprofitable state longer than necessary. Their fleet appraising glances rested on me and the silver bucket by my chair, and one permitted the shadow of a discreet smile to appear on her carmined lips. She was pretty, lightly dressed in a flowery summer stuff, but she was as gold in coloring as corn silk; an intrusion in Havana I seriously deplored. The other was dark, but she was, at the same time, disagreeable; something had annoyed her excessively, and I made no move. Such company was occasionally entertaining, in a superficial conversational sense; but, I was obliged to add, not often.
I went over all the informal girls I could recall who had been worth the effort to cultivate them, either charming or wise or sensitive, and my bag, unlike Chopin's or what George Moore reported his, was discouragingly slim. They had been, but perhaps of necessity, materialists, valuers only of the expensively concrete; yes, the majority of such adventures had been sordid. It was due, without question, to certain deterrent qualities in my own personality; but even more, I was convinced, to the fact that, in America, girls, or at least those of my youth, regarded emotion as portentously synonymous with ruin. Emotion, for nice girls, was deprecated; their sense of modesty, of shame, was magnified at the expense of everything else. This, together with the tragic difference in the age of marriage in nature and in society, had condemned the United States to very low levels of feeling.
Unfortunately I had been born into the most rigid of all societies—a prosperous and Presbyterian middle-class; an influence that succeeded in making religion hideous before I was fifteen, planting in me, too, the belief that man was, in his instinctive life, filthy. I outgrew the latter, but never the first; and now, looking back, I could recognize how that lauded creed had nearly damned me to a hell far surpassing in dreadfulness anything of its own bitter imagining. The cold metaphysical fog had saturated us all alike.... How dreary my early experience was ... what detestable travesties of passion! A carful of young men soon stopped at the curb of the Miramar, and the two girls, dark and gold, were immediately invested with the politest attentions. There was a chorus of laughter and protests and suggestions, in which a privileged waiter joined; and afterwards they vociferously left to dance at Carmelo.
* * *
Walking generally in the direction of my room, I left the Prado for an especially dramatic, no, melodramatic, street, where the bare walls and iron bolted doors were made startling by the white glare of electric lights. Fixed to the walls, infrequently, were the wrought-iron brackets of the earlier lanterns, converted, it might be, for the period before the present, into gas jets. In that watery illumination such streets must have seemed less amazing than now, and entirely natural with only the oil lanterns lifting a small surface of masonry or an isolated angle out of the night. Indeed, whole districts were dark, except for a rare lamp privately maintained as an obligation of grace. That darkness, like the streets, was mediæval; they belonged one to the other—ways through which it was congruous to carry a flare and a sword, practical measures both.
These precautions had been long discarded, but the passages themselves were unchanged, not a stone had shifted; they were, particularly at night, the Middle Ages. And it was as though a sudden blaze had been created by unholy magic; a sparkling and infernal radiance, throwing into intolerable clearness the decent reticence of the time. The arc lights gave the streets an absolute air of unreality and tragic strangeness. Moving in them, I had the feeling of blundering awake into a dream, of being irretrievably lost in an illusion of potential horror. An open door with its glimpse into an inner room only increased the oppression: it, too, was brilliant with electricity, a room of unrelieved icy pallor, except for a warmer blur under an Agony on the Cross, where a small company of men and women sat in a rigid blanched formality that might have been death.