It was quite natural, a commonplace of Havana; but rather than a picture of familiar life, it resembled the memento mori of a grotto. My thoughts turned to the symbols and representations of the Catholic Church—a business of blood and torment and flame, of Sebastian torn with arrows and a canonized girl, whose name I forgot, carrying her eyeballs in a hand. Curiously enough, the spirit which had given birth to this suffering had been popularly lost, together with any conception of the ages in which it occurred; and all that remained was a pathological horror. Italy and Spain were saturated by it—Italy in the revolting wax spectacles of Easter, and Spain with the veritable crucifixions of to-day.
It was, I supposed, to a certain extent unavoidable in an establishment whose hold on the ponderable present depended on threats and promises laid in the future. But it seemed to me unfortunate, to say the least, that a church whose business was life should be so concerned with smoky death. Threats and promises! The early history of Cuba, I remembered, was inbound with the administrative and protective powers of the Church: in fifteen hundred and sixteen the native Cubeños were put in the charge of the Order of Jeronimites, localized in La Espanola—Santo Domingo. The double motive of the Spanish Christian kings in the western hemisphere had been conversion and gold, but which of these was uppermost it was impossible to determine. However, when the gold, the temporal interest, decreased in one locality, the spiritual concern of Seville shifted to the more productive regions.
That was a period, a conquest, when a violent death was a greater blessing than living in a state of damnable heresy; and so, between the saving of their souls and the loss of their bodies in the king's mines, the natives were thoroughly cared for. It must be said, though, that de las Casas, a priest whose spirit was above any intimidation or venality, denounced the outrages against the Cuban Indians to the shining heavens, the cerulean sea, the Audencia, and the Throne. But his humanitarianism was ineffectual against a system founded on the belief that a god had given the earth and its recalcitrant people for the profit and glory, the servants, of a single religious dogma.
It was, possibly, a mental imperfection which gave impressions, emotions, such a great suggestibility. Returning toward the Inglaterra, I had no intention of losing myself in the mazes of applied theology; and I speedily dropped such a sombre topic from my thoughts. Turning back to the Prado, I found the walks filled with men, progressing slowly or seated on the flat marble benches along the sides. Whenever a woman did pass on foot, their interest and speculations were endless: heads turned in rows, sage remarks were exchanged, and tentative simpaticas murmured. Her mother—if she had the slightest pretensions to youth or good looks—was fervently blessed for so fetching a daughter. Here, of course, was the defect of the local attitude toward women—it put the emphasis perpetually on a gallantry affecting the men more even than the women. There was a constant danger of becoming one-sided.
The Telegrafo and the Louvre were crowded, with more refrescos and ices on the table than authoritative drinks; the cigarettes of the discursive throngs in the Parque Central were like a sheet of fire-flies, and the Marti and Pairet theatres were spreading abroad the audiences of their second evening shows. The patio of the Inglaterra was well filled, and I stopped there; not, however, for a naranjada. Some late suppers were still occupying the dining-room, and a drunken American was gravely addressing a table and meeting with a mechanical politeness that I admired for its sustained patience. He left, finally, and wandered unsteadily, a subject of entertainment for his fellows and a mark of contempt to the Cubans present. Beyond me were some beautifully dressed English—two men in the final perfection of easy masculine garb and a girl, flushed with beauty, in pearls. On the other hand a young Frenchman, decorated with the most honorable of war ribbons, and two women, all in mourning, were conversing in the difficult Parisian idiom.
I should have liked to be at either table—their attractions were equal; but, forced to remain alone, I thought of how rude the English would have been had I moved over to them. The English would have been boorish, and the French would have met me with an impenetrable polite reserve. Both would regard me as an idiot or an agent; to have spoken to them would have been an affront. And yet I was confident that we should have got on very well: I was not without a name in London, and the French were delightfully sensitive to any practising of the arts. The English, I gathered from their unguarded talk, were cruising on a yacht now lying in Havana harbor; and I saw myself, the following morning, going off to them in a smart tender and sitting under the white awning spread aft, with a whisky and soda, talking or not, but happily aware of the shining brass and mahogany fittings, the immaculate paint and gay pennants.
I had always liked worldly pomp and settings, marble Georgian houses with the long windows open directly on closed greens and statues of lead; and to linger, before going down to dinner, on a minstrel's gallery above a stone hall and gathered company. I'd rather be on a yacht than on an excursion boat; yet I infinitely preferred reading about the latter. For some hidden or half perceived reason, yachts were not impressive in creative prose; there the concerns and pleasures of aristocracy frequently appeared tawdry and unimportant. Even its heroism, in the valor of battle and imperturbable sacrifice, was less moving to me than simpler affairs. Yet there was no doubt but that I was personally inclined to the extremes of luxury; and this apparent contradiction brought to my life, my writing, the problem of a devotion to words as disarmingly simple as the leaves of spring—as simple and as lovely in clear color—about the common experience of life and death, together with an absorbing attention for Manchu women and exotic children and emeralds.
* * *
The following day, hot and still, with the exception of capricious movements of air in paved shaded places, was overcast, the brilliancy of Havana, of the white and green plazas, subdued. And this softening of sharp lines and blazing façades seemed to influence, too, the noises, the calls, of the streets, so that it was all apparently insubstantial, like the ultimate romantic mirage of a city. I wandered along Neptuno Street to Belascoin, and then to the Parque Maceo, where I ignored the massed bronze and granite of its statue for the slightly undulating shimmering tide. In the distance the sea was lost in the sky—a nebulous gray expanse such as might have existed before the beginning of comparative solidity. I lost all sense of time, the centuries were jumbled together like mangos in a basket. Yes, they were no greater, no more important or stable, than tropical fruit.
The vivid spectacle of Cuba, for example, contracted to a palm's breadth, the island became nothing more than the glimmer of a torch in illimitable dusk. It had been discovered by Columbus, a presumptuous term used arrogantly in the sense of created; an Arcadian shore where, because food grew without cultivation, without effort, and the gold was soft for beating into bracelets, the natives lived easily and ornamentally and in peace. They wore, rather than steel and the harsh shirts of the Inquisition, the feathers of birds with woven dyed quills and fragrant grasses. They sang, they danced with a notable grace, loved and died in the simplicity of bohios of palm board and thatch under nine Caciques.