One of the women—who, in the arrangement of the box, sat beside me—smiled with a magnetism that had easily survived the loss of her youth; she was rather silent than not, but the rest swept into a conversation in their best public manner. A man accompanying them, it developed, knew Cuba and Jai Alai, and he secured for the amusement of the others a cesta, the basket-like racquet worn strapped to the arm. It was from him I discovered that the court was two hundred and ten feet long and thirty-six feet wide; while the service consisted in dropping the ball and, on its rebound, catching it in the cesta and throwing it against the far end wall. From there, with a sharp smack audible all over the Fronton, the ball shot back, if not a fault, within a marked area, and one of the opposing side caught it, in the air or on the first bounce, and returned it against the end wall. At first I could see nothing but the violent activity of the players, frozen into statuesque attitudes of throwing; vigorous figures in, mostly, white, with soft red silk sashes. I heard the ball hit, and saw it rolling out of play; and then, with some slight realization of the rapidity of its flight, I was able to follow the course from cesta to wall and floor.
There had never been, I was certain, another game in which instantaneous judgment, skill, and endurance had been carried to such a far point. There was seldom a fault or error; the ball, flying like a bullet, was caught and flung with a single gesture; again and again it carried from one end wall to the other, from which it was hurled on. Angles of flight were calculated and controlled, the long side wall was utilized.... Then a player of the Azules was hit in the ankle, and the abruptness with which he went down showed me a possibility I had ignored.
During this the clamor of the audience was indescribable, made up, for the most part, of the difficulties of constantly shifting odds and betting. The odds changed practically with every passage of the ball: opening at, say, five to three against the favorites, as they drew steadily ahead in a game of twenty-five points it jumped to eight to four, ten to three, anything that could be placed. On the floor a small company of bookmakers, distinguished by their scarlet caps, shouted in every direction, and betting paper was thrown adroitly through the air in hollow rubber balls. Those who had backed at favorable odds the team now far ahead were yelling jubilantly, and others were trying, at the expense of their lungs, to cover by hedging their probable losses.
There was, however, toward what should have been the end, an unlooked-for development—the team apparently hopelessly behind crept up. An astounded pause followed, and then an uproar rose that cast the former sound into insignificance. Soon the score was practically tied: there were shrill entreaties, basso curses, a storm of indiscriminate insults. Now the backers of the lesser couple scrambled vocally to take advantage of the betting opportunities forever lost—the odds were even, then depressed on the other side. When the game was over the noise died instantly: men black with passion, shaking with rage, crushing their hats or with lifted clenched fists, at once conversed with smiling affability. My eyes had been badly strained, and I was glad to leave the box and stroll along the promenade. The betting counters were jammed by the owners of winning tickets, the men behind the bar were, in their own way, as active as the pelota players.
The majority of the boxes were occupied by Cuban families, but yet there was an appreciable number of foreigners. A slender girl, in a low dinner dress, was sitting on the railing of her box, swinging a graceful slipper and smoking a cigarette—New York was indelibly stamped on her—and, among the masculine world of Spanish antecedents, she created a frank center of interest. For her part, she studied the crowd quite blocking the way below her with a cold indifference, the personification of young assured arrogance.
A quiniela followed, with six contestants, one against the other in successive pairs; but my eyes were now definitely exhausted by the necessarily shifting gaze, and my interest fastened on the woman beside me. She was at once intimately attached to the people with her and abstracted in bearing: a woman not far from fifty, but graceful still and, in a flexible black silk crêpe with a broad girdle of jet, still desirable. It seemed to me that, in spite of an admirable manner, she was a little impatient at the volubility around her; or it might be, in contradiction to this, she was exercising a patience based on fortitude. It was clear that she hadn't a great deal in common with the man who had evidently been married to her for a considerable length of years. They spoke little—it was he who had fetched the cesta—both immersed in individual thoughts. A woman, I decided, finely sensitive, superior; who, as she had grown older, had found no demand for the qualities which she knew to be her best.
A painful situation, a shocking waste, from which, for her, there was no escape, for she had patently what was known as character. She at once was conscious of the absolute need for spiritual freedom and bound by commitments paramount to her self-esteem. But even if she had been more daring, less conscientious, what could she have gained; what was there for her in a society condemned to express the spirit in the terms of flesh? She had too much charm, too great a vitality, to be absorbed in the superficial affairs of women, the substitute life of charity. And once married, probably to a man the model of kindly faith, she was caught in a desert of sterile monotony. Even children, I could see, if they existed, had not slain her questioning attractive personality.
She smiled at me again, later, her narrow slightly wasting hands clasped about a knee—a smile of sympathetic comprehension and unquenchable woman. She would have been happier chattering in the obvious strain of stupidity behind her: any special beauty was always paid for in the imposed loneliness of a spoken or unspoken surrounding resentment. To be content with a facile compliment, the majority of tricks at auction bridge, mechanical pleasures, was the measure of wisdom for women in her situation. The last quiniela over, plainly weary she gathered a cloak about her shoulders and left the box, without, as I had hoped, some last gesture or even a word: and I pictured her sitting listlessly, distraught, in the café to which they were proceeding.
* * *
The pelota immediately vanished from my mind before the infinitely more fundamental and interesting problem of marriage; and—remembering the ominous sign of a woman's club on the Malecón—I wondered if the Cuban women were contented with the tradition as it had been handed down to them. In the life that I knew in the north, an infinitesimal grain of sand irritating in the body of the United States, the sacredness of matrimony had waned very seriously; it would, of course, go on, probably for ever, since no other arrangement could be thought of conciliating the necessities of both dreams and property; but, subjected to the scrutiny of intelligence rather than sentimentality, it seemed both impotent and foolish. The impotence certainly, for whereas my grandfather had thirteen children and my mother four—or was it five?—I had none. There had always been individuals unrestrained by the complicated oaths of the wedding service—a strictly legal proceeding to which the church had been permitted to add its furbelows—dissatisfied ladies, and gentlemen of the commercial road. I wasn't referring to them, but to the look, at once puzzled, humorous, and impatient, that lately I had seen wives of probity turn on their husbands.