San Cristóbal de la Habana

by Joseph Hergesheimer

Or, in Havana, of the oranges. In the meanwhile the patios gave me an inexhaustible pleasure. Sometimes the walls were glazed with tiles and the octagonal surface of the fountain held the reflected tracery of bamboo, while a royal palm towered over the balusters of the roof and hanging lamps were crowned with fretted metal. Another, with its flags broken and the basin dry, was deserted except for the soundless flame-like passage of chromatic lizards; still another was bare, with solid deep arcades and shadows on the ground and a second gallery of gracefully light arches. There was, in one, a lawn-parasol in candy-colored stripes with low wicker chairs and gay cushions; on a table some tall glasses elbowed a syphon, English gin, and a silver dish of limes, and a blue-and-yellow macaw was secured to a black lacquer stand.

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That, evidently, was not characteristic of Havana, and yet the city absorbed it, made it a part of a complex richness, a complexity as brilliantly blended as a rainbow. At first I had been entranced by the sudden colorful display, it had seemed to be in one marvellously high key; but now I recognized that it was composed of the entire scale, and that there were notes profoundly dark. I should have known that, for I had been, when I was much younger, a painter, and I had learned that surfaces which seemed to be in one tone were made up of a hundred. The city, of course, was an accumulation of the men who had made it, the women who had lived there; and it was possible that Havana had as intense and varied a foundation as any place that had existed.

Not in the sense, the historical importance of, for example, Athens; I had already said that Havana was a city without history, which was true in the cumulative, inter-human meaning of that term. But it had, within its limits, on its island like a flower in air, an amazing and absorbing past. In the beginning, where Spain was concerned, Cuba, a fabulous land, had promised fabulous gold; but the empires of the Aztecs and Peru, incalculably richer, and the fatal dream of eternal youth in Florida, had robbed it of royal interest, of men, food, and ships. It had settled back, lost to most concern beyond a perfunctory colonial administration, into a region of agriculture, affected only indirectly by, and affecting not at all, the universal upheaval elsewhere. Within Havana itself, then, moulded by the burning sun, the cooling night winds, and the severing water, a peculiarly essential human development had taken place. And its history was, for this reason, elusive, most difficult to grasp; hopelessly concealed from a mere examination of bastions.

One by one the colors of its fantastic design grew clearer to me; period by period the streets and people became intelligible, until they reached the middle-century era to which I was so susceptible. To arrive, with the ingredients of a tropical Spain and the pirates of the world, at an early Victorianism was a mystery which demanded a close investigation. That air enveloped all the center of the city, its paseos and plazas and buildings, and still influenced the social life. This, I finally decided, came from the fact that the architectural spirit which dominated Havana was of the period before Eastlake; or at least I was not familiar with any structures erected in such a style, so lavishly marble, since then.

There was no absence of modernity in the wharfs and streets, but that loud impetuous tide poured through the ways of a quieter water, and in the side passages the sound diminished. Havana was a great port, but the steam shipping along its waterfront was incongruous with the low tranquil whiteness, the pseudo-classicism, of the buildings that held along the bay. The latter particular, elaborated from my first impression, carried the city back to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. I had no intention of examining the dates of numerous structures, but the stamp of their time was on the Ionic entablatures. Then women, as well, had copied in their dress the symbol of the Greek column, of sculpture instead of painting, except for the charming and illogical innovation of turbans; and they went about in sandals and gowns falling straight from their looped breasts. Such a figure, with her head bound in vermilion, must have been enticing in the great shaded bare rooms. There must have been, too, an extraordinary assemblage of negro pages and majordomos in ruby silks and canary and velvet.

The feminine silhouette changed remarkably in thirty years, from a column to a cone, from the ultimate in flowing lines to a bouquet-like rigidity; and the severity of furnishings, of incidentals, expanded in queer elaborations. It was, notably, a period of prudery, of all which, objectively, I disliked; while at the same time there had been the undercurrent of license that always accompanied an oppressive hypocrisy. This, I could see, was true of its age in Havana: men—the real prudes—had been heavily whiskered at home with a repressed morality, and betrayed in another quarter by heredity and the climate. Two periods that, except for some beautiful books, had been steeped in an ugliness from which the world had not recovered. Indeed, while it was now fashionable to deride them, the present was, in some ways, perceptibly worse: Literature was, perhaps, bolder in scope, but it showed hardly more than a surprise at the sound of its comparative liberty of speech. The art of painting had burst into frantic fragments that might or might not later be assembled into meaning; the architecture had degenerated into nothing more than skilful or stupid adaptation.

In the large disasters that were sweeping the world, the mad confusion of injustice and revolt, of contending privilege, the serene primness of Havana, its starched formality of appearance, offered a priceless quietude. It was, at once, static and mobile, a place of countless moods that merged at the turning of a corner, the shifting of a glance from La Punta to the circular bandstand at the foot of the Prado. Never pedantic, it was a city more for the emotions than the intellect; intellect, in its astigmatic conceit, had largely overlooked Havana; and Havana had missed little enough. Its monuments and statues, where they were complacently innocent of art, had been brought into harmony of tone by the atmosphere vivid like the flambeau trees, the inconceivable blueness of its sea. The colors of the houses, glaringly or palely inappropriate, were melted and bound into inevitable rightness. Even the cemetery, frosted with tombs like a monstrous iced cake, its shafts that might have been the crystallized stalagmites of the caves of death, resembled nothing more disturbing than the lacy pantalets of the time it celebrated. It was the final accomplishment of mid-Victorian horror, with its pit of mouldering bones and solemn ritualistic nonsense; yet the thought of the ponderous gold and black catafalques rolling in procession between the horizontal white slabs, of the winking candles—all the ghastly appendages of religious undertaking—and the clergy in purple and fine cambric, with amethyst rings on their fat or their thin fingers, gave it the feeling of a remote mummery.

The cemetery from which I escaped with relief and the café that I entered with pleasure—again the Telegrafo—flowed together in the city's general impression. I could see the statue of Marti, and, as I looked, it changed into the statue of Isabel; then that, too, vanished. The broad paved avenue, the flagged walks, became a gravelled plaza about which the girls promenaded in one direction to pass constantly the youths circling in the other. The vision flickered and died, and I went on to lunch through the Havana of so many days smoothly packed into one.

I felt that my first sense of instinctive familiarity had been justified; yet, in the corridor of the Inglaterra, asked by a traveler how to get to a restaurant, the Dos Hermanos, I was unable to reply; and a third American, brushing me aside, gave him voluble instructions. It ended by his being taken out and seated in a hack, while the other, in angry execrable and fluent Spanish, told the driver where to proceed. Whatever I had learned, it seemed, was of no practical value; my multiple sensations were not reducible to the simplest demand. A woman passed with a copy of an ultra popular novel, and this recalled the long struggle of my early books for the smallest recognition. If that dark frame of mind had fastened on me in the north, it would have burdened me for a day; but in Havana, with the Marquis de Riscal and a Por Larrañaga, I envied no mediocre novelist her stereotyped laurels. It was impossible to get anywhere a better wine or a cigar that changed more soothingly from the brown of fact to blue fancy.