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Some of these considerations returned to my mind the following afternoon, when my fancy had been captured by a woman on a balcony of the Malecón. The house was small, crushed between two imposing structures that had been residences but were now apartments, scarcely two stories and set back of the line, with the balcony at a lower window. The woman was neither young nor lovely, but, folded in a shawl, it might have been one of the lost mantillas, she was invested with a melancholy dignity. It was possible, in the briefest passage, to see not only her history but the story of a decade, of a vanished greatness lingering through a last afternoon before extinction—a gesture of Spain finally submerged in the western seas of skepticism.
I was extraordinarily grateful to her for standing wrapped with the shawl in immobile sadness. That was all I wanted from her, the most indeed, she could give: apart from the balcony, hurrying along the street with the black lace drawn closely about her head, she would have been meaningless. The hour in which I saw her, too, the swiftly fading radiance, had its inevitable part in the effect she produced. I had, I realized, no wish to restore her to either youth or happiness, I didn't want to improve her, or the case of Spain, in any way; she was perfect for my purpose, so eminently selfish, as she was. In begging, in imagination, the women of Havana to remain on their balconies, I hadn't given a thought to their welfare or desires.
The truth was that I regarded them as a part of their iron grilling, figures on a canvas, the balconies and women inseparable from each other. It might well be that this was no more than the intolerable oppression of the past incongruously thrust upon the present, and that at any minute the women, in righteous indignation and revolt, would step down into life. But if they were to do that, I hoped it would be put off until I had returned to the land of the feminine free; I didn't want to be present when the balconies were definitely deserted for the publicity of the Sevilla. I should regret their loss heavily, those points of vantage gracefully ranged across the brilliant façades of Havana. For there was no other city where balconies were so universal, so varied, and so seductive. I recalled a balcony high over the Rond Point de Plain-palais, in Geneva, where, on the left, could be seen the blue line of the Jura and on the right, through the mounting Rue de Carouge, the abrupt green cliff of the Salve. Curiously, there were a great many balconies in Geneva giving on many beautiful prospects—the Promenade des Bastions and La Treille, the Cité and bridged water; but they were no more than pleasant, they had no deep significance whatever. The balconies of Charleston were rather galleries turned privately on gardens and not upon the streets; while those over the banquettes of New Orleans, of the vieux carré, had long ago been emptied of their flowered muslins.
The popularity of balconies, their purpose, had remained, until now at least, largely unchanged in Havana. On Sol Street, in the neighborhood of Oficios and where it met the harbor, they solidly terminated their tall windows, reached the heights of discreet tradition. There the way was so narrow that a head above must be bent forward to see what was passing, affording a clear view of high comb and bright lips, provocative in the intimacy of their suggestion. The balconies of the Malecón looked out, conversely, across the unbroken tide of the sea—in the afternoon, when it was fair, a magical sweep of unutterable blue. Yet they had suffered a decline—as though the constant noise of automobiles had rent an evanescent spirit.
The women there might see, as they chose, either the parade of fashion or the grey walls and the far horizon; but from the balconies of the Prado only the former was visible, the whirling motor cars and the pedestrians in the rows of India laurels. Here the balconies through the early and late evening were crowded; the chatter, the gesticulations and smiles, evident on the street. The clothes, however, were no longer Spanish in characteristic detail, but Parisian; while the essential atmosphere, the color, of the balconies remained. In carnival—I had just missed it—they were hung with serpentine and exchanged bombardments of roses and compliments with the street; but now their fastness, except to the flutter of a hand, was absolute.
I saw a group of girls at an impressive window of the Prado, on the corner of either Trocadero or Colon Street, all in white except for the clear scarlet of one, like a blazing camellia among gardenias; and, for a day after, their dark loveliness stayed in my mind. They had had tea, probably, in the corner of a high cool room with a marble floor, furnished in pale gilt. I had no doubt that a piano had been played for a brief explanatory dancing, the trial of new steps neither French nor Spanish, but American. Some of them, I knew, had been at school in New York—probably Miss Spence's, where balconies were not cultivated—and I wondered what they thought about the Havana to which they had returned. Well, if the Cuban men, the fathers and suitors and husbands, preferred to keep the historic architecture of their society, of their climate, a convent of some Sacred Heart would be wiser than a celebrated American finishing school.
The New York scene, however carefully veiled and chaperoned, was a disquieting preparation for the Prado, or even Vedado. What the life on an estancia was, I couldn't imagine; I had been told that, for a woman, oftener than not, it was still a model of Castilian rigidity. It had, in fact, been suggested to me that I write the story of such a girl, shut away from everything that she had been permitted to see and desire. Unquestionably a splendid subject, one of the vessels that would hold everything an ability could pour into it. I realized at once which, in that individual struggle, must conquer—the heredity of Cuba would be more powerful than an isolated feminine need. The other women, the elders, who surrounded her, would be as relentless as any husband, and in the end she'd become fat and listless.
Widely different balconies held my attention—on one, flooded with the morning sun, two women with carnation cheeks and elaborately dressed hair, but for the rest strikingly informal, laughed an invitation to me that took no account of the hour. They were, I suppose, tawdry, the cheap familiars of a cheap street; but the gay orange wall where they lounged like the painted actors of a zarzuela, their yellow satin slippers and shoulders impudently bare above chemises pink and blue, all gave them a certain distinction. Again, in the section of Jesus del Monte, there were buildings brilliantly and impossibly painted, usually with cafés on the ground, whose balconies, exposed to an intolerable heat, overlooked dingy sun-baked fields. They were always empty.... I could never imagine their use—for there was not only nothing to see, but no one to be seen by. The houses of Havana, admirable in the closeness of the city, possible in a bougainvillia-smothered suburb, were depressingly inappropriate to any contact with the country. They were lost, detached or strayed away from their fellows; for the happy plan of the country house was that of exposure to all the favorable winds that blew, to verandas and open halls rather than balconies and patios: it was merged into vistas and not relentlessly and jealously shut on every face.
A fact that had nothing to do with the tropics or the outskirts of Havana, where wide dusty stone avenues dropped abruptly in soft roads, and the balconies were added purely from habit. My own balcony, at the Hotel Inglaterra, was ideally placed, with its command of an angle of the Parque Central. I often sat there before dinner, or past the middle of night; there was always, then, a wind stirring over San Rafael Street; but the balconies on either side of me, above and below, were invariably empty, their purpose, it was plain, mistrusted.