San Cristóbal de la Habana

by Joseph Hergesheimer

I sat, for a while, in a walnut rocking chair at an end of the sweep, which amazed me by an architecture, the impressiveness of which approached oppression. A wall was broken by a file of slatted doors, and from one of these came the minute irritable clatter of a typewriter; the bell at the finish of a line sounded like the shiver of a tapped glass, and a child spoke. It was difficult to think of the Hotel de Luz as a place of normal residence, as existing at all except in the mental fantasias of Piranesi—it resembled exactly one of his sere vertiginous engravings. Yet it was, I knew, the favorite hotel of travelers from the Canary Islands.

Continuing to rock slightly and smoke, I pursued the extremely recondite subject of just such impressions as I had there received: a very important inquiry, for it had to do with the secret, the unintelligible heart, of my writing. There was, obviously, in the Hotel de Luz nothing intrinsically terrifying, strange. My attitude toward it would be dismissed as absurd by the Canary Islanders. But the effect it produced on me was tangible, ponderable; it tyrannized over my imagination and drove it into corridors of thought as sombre as that in reality before me. I had seen the Piranesi engravings when I was very young and painfully susceptible to mental darkness and fears; and they had undoubtedly left their indelible mark ... now brought out by the black and white marble squares diminishing with the walls in parallel lines.

The reality of what I felt, then, lay in the combining of the surroundings and my imagination—a condition, a result, if not unique, at least unlikely to be often repeated. The sum of another emotional experience and the Hotel de Luz would be totally different, but equally true with my own; and from that confusion misunderstanding arose. The actuality was neither concrete nor subjective; yet, woven of these double threads, it was absolute. The individuality of places and hours absorbed me; there was no word in English to express my meaning—the perception of the inanimate moods of place. It belonged, rather than to the novel, to the painter, and possibly occupied too great a space in my pages. Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than the people in or out of them.

But it was no longer possible, if it had ever been, to disentangle one from the other, the personal from what seemed the impersonal; for, while nature was carelessly free from beauty and sentiment and morals, it had been invested with each of these qualities in turn by a differently developing intelligence. The elements of nature, partly in hand, were arbitrarily and subconsciously projected in set forms. I stopped to think how the mobility of mind perpetually solidified, like cement, about itself; how fluid ideas, aspirations, always hardened into institutions, then prisons, then mortuary vaults. Religion had done this signally, both profoundly and superficially—it was impossible to picture the faith of John Fox under the frescoes of La Merced Church, a Methodist exuberance in St. Michael's at Richmond; the Roman ritual was as much a thing of its silver altars as the Episcopal Church in Virginia depended on historic communion services and austere box pews.

Not only was I specially intent on these values: my inability to see men as free from them, as spiritual conquistadores, had been a cause of difficulty in the popularity and sale of my books. I lacked both the conceptions of man as an Atlas, holding up the painted globe, or an individual mounting securely into perpetuity. If the latter were true, if there were no death, the dignity of all the great tragic moments of life and art, the splendor of sacrifice, was cheapened to nothing. I would have gladly surrendered these for the privilege of continued existence—in a sphere not dominated by hymnology—but, skeptical of the future, all I possessed, my sole ideal, was a passionate admiration for the courage of a humanity condemned to the loss of warm life.

I had grown more serious than I intended, than, in Havana, was necessary; what I had set out to discover was simply the explanation of my feeling about the Hotel de Luz; but undoubtedly it was better for me to accept emotions, merely to record them, than attempt analysis.

I had had very little schooling in processes of exact thought, practically no mental gymnastics. But this was not an imposed hardship on which I looked back with regret—I had been free to fill my life with scholastic routine, but balked absolutely: in class rooms a blankness like a fog had settled over me, from which, after a short half-hearted struggle, I emerged to follow what, namelessly, interested me. That, for example, was precisely the manner of my stay in Havana. A course for which the worst was predicted, specially since I persisted in writing. And I could see how I'd be censured by the frugal-minded for such a book as I was more than likely to bring to San Cristóbal de la Habana.

There was, in reality, no practical reason to write about it at all, since it had been admirably and thoroughly described, the sights, pleasures, and sounds, in reputable and laudatory paragraphs, a source of pride to the natives. Here no one could predict, in my search, what would seem important, to be transcribed—the colored glass above a window, the sugar at the bottom of a cocktail—and my moral sense, of course, would be as impotent as my political position was negligible. Yet the qualities ignored by a more solemn intelligence than mine were precisely what formed the spirit of Havana; their comprehension was necessary to that perception of an inanimate mood of place.

I was constantly in a disagreement with the accepted opinion of what were, at bottom, the more serious facts, the determining pressures of existence; and it had always been at the back of my head to write a novel built from just such trivialities as, it seemed to me, enormously affected human fate. A very absorbing idea that had gone as far as an introduction called A Preface of Imperishable Trifles; but the realization that I had begun in that manner—a suspicious circumstance in a novel,—where no shadow of an explanation, a justification, was permissible, led me to put it away. It was the serious defect of the novel that it commonly resembled the mechanism of an ingenious lock in which the key turned smoothly for the flinging open, at the appropriate moment, of a door upon a tableau of justice. It lacked almost entirely the fatalities of sheer chance, of inconsiderable accidents, which gave life its characteristic insecurity.

I had left the Hotel de Luz for echoing stone galleries and streets and empty paved plazas when I told myself that mine would have simply been a story of shifted emphasis, for which I should have used my own memories, since I recalled the wallpaper of a music room after thirty years more clearly than the details of my father's death, happening when I was practically mature. The unavoidable conclusion of this was that the paper, in a way I made no pretence to explain, bore upon me more deeply than my father; and, with that in view, it was perhaps as well that the story had remained unwritten.