San Cristóbal de la Habana

by Joseph Hergesheimer

* * *

The patios of Havana, turned so uncompromisingly from the street, were, perhaps for that reason, even more engaging than the balconies. I saw them, except those of the government buildings and others semi-public, through opening or half open doors, or sometimes I looked down into them from superior heights. They, too, were countless in variety, from the merest kitchen areas and places of heaped refuse to lovely garden rooms of flowers and glazed tiling and fountains. This sense of privacy, of enclosure, in a garden was their most charming feature; and the possibilities and implications of a patio created a whole social life with which I was necessarily unfamiliar. They were, usually, in the hours I knew them, empty but for passing servants ... obviously their time was late afternoon or evening: fixed to the inner walls were the iron brackets of lamps, and it was easy to imagine them dimly lighted and flooded with perfume, with the scent of magnolias and the whisper of the fountains.

These details, separately, were not rare, but shut into the masonry of Havana, their beauty shown in momentary glimpses on streets of blank walls, their fragrance drooping into unexpected barren places, the patios stirred my inherent desires. As usual, I didn't want to be gazing at them from without, but to be a part of their existence: I wanted to sleep on one, in a room nothing but a stone gallery, or watch the moonlight slip over the leaves of the crape myrtles and the tiles and sink into the water. But not to-day, for there were discordant sounds through the arches with slender twisted Moorish pillars—the subdued harshness of mechanical music, the echoes of that dissatisfaction which was everywhere now recognized as improvement. I demanded guitars.

The masculine chords of the guitar, the least sentimental of instruments, as the Spaniards were the least sentimental of people, the deep vibration of resinous stopped strings, was the perfect accompaniment to that color visible and invisible. Invisible! Always that, first and most potent. The perpetuity of atmosphere through transmitted feeling was far more absorbing than the other chimera, of incorruption. It was tradition, more than moonlight, that steeped the patios with kindled obscure romantic longings. Within their formal squares they held the spirit of a great history and of two great races, two continents. They, the patios, were the East in the West, the Moroscos on the Peninsula.

The dress of the present, even the floating films of the women, was misplaced; these were, in reality, the courtyards of the Orient, and they needed the dignity of grave robes and gestures, bearded serenity. In them, initially, women had been flowers lightly clasped with bands of rubies and dyed illusory veils; there had been no guitars then, but silver flutes. However, I had no desire to be a part of that time; it was Spain that possessed me, and not in Grenada but Cuba, during the Captain-generalship of the Conde de Ricla, in the seventeen sixties when the British conquests under Albemarle were returned to the island. That was a period of building and prosperity, the fortifications of San Carlos and Atares were established, Morro and the Cabañas refashioned, and the streets and houses of Havana named and numbered. The decline of Spain, a long imperceptible crumbling, had already begun, but its effect was not visible in Cuba; there still was a Castilian arrogance burned more brown, more vivid, by the Caribbean.

A little late for the plate ships sailing in cloudy companies and filling Havana with the swords of Mexico and Peru; but my mind and inclinations were not heroic; I could dispense with Pizarro's soldiers, fanciful with the ornaments of the Incas, for the quiet of walled gardens, the hooped brocades of court dresses; all the transplanted grace of the city and hour. Climate was greater than man, and the first Cubeños, dead in the mines of Cobre, were being revenged for the usurpation of their happiness and land; the negroes of the slave trade, too, were repaying their chains to the last link of misery. But these counter influences were not perceptible yet in the patios, just as the French Revolution had still to scatter the polite pastorals only to survive in the canvases of Boucher and Watteau.

It was, in Havana as well as Seville, the farewell of true formality, for after that it became only a form. No one, afterwards, was to bow instinctively as he left a room or dance to the measures of Beethoven and Mozart. A useless plant cut down by a rusty scythe! The elegance of Cuba, however, changing into later Victorianism, was, in the time of de Ricla, greatly enhanced by its surrounding, by the day before yesterday when there had been only thatched bohios where now were patios of marble. Those quiet spaces were sentient with all this, just as the patios of the churches held the sibilant whisper of the sandals of the Inquisition, an order already malodorous and expelled from the island by Antonio Maria Bucarely, the following Captain-general.

But even yet it would be possible, with the details carefully arranged, to find an emotional situation in a patio undisturbed since the middle eighteenth century; for the revenge of the Cubeños and of Africa, of the red and the black slaves, was that, with the faint or full infusion of their bloods into their conquerors, dwindled unintelligible desires and dreamlike passions entered as well. A discoloration of the mind as actual as the darkening of the skin! And I pictured an obscure impulse buried in the personality of a sensitive and reserved man, such a trait as, at moments of extreme pressure, would betray him into a hateful savagery; or it might be better brought out by a galling secret barbarity of taste. The Spain of Philip, primitive Africa, and a virginal island race constrained into one body and spirit must be richly dramatic.

It was imperative to regard the patios in such a light, with a strong infusion of reality, for, half apprehended, they produced that thin tinkling note of sham romance; they evoked, for a ready susceptibility, the impressions of opera bouffe ... a danger constantly present in my thoughts. As it was, I should be accused again of avoiding the actual and the difficult for an easy unreality; but there was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid back in point of time—no one had charged me with an historical novel.

There was another, perhaps safer, attitude toward the balconies and patios of Havana: to regard them in an unrelieved mood of realism, to show them livid with blue paint and echoing with shrill misery, typhoid fever, and poverty. If I did that, automatically a number of serious critical intellects would give me their withheld support, they would no longer regard me as a bright cork floating thoughtlessly over the opaque depths of life. Well, they could—they'd have to—go to the devil; for I had my own honesty to serve, my own plot to tend—a plot, as I have said, where, knowing the effort hopeless, I tried only to grow a flower spray. If I could put on paper an apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of the apples.