Was it a healthy rebellion against the prudery of repression or the adventitious excitation of imminent impotence? Whatever had brought it about, it was stupid, an insensate jiggling of the body without frankness or grace. I hadn't yet seen the Cuban rumba, with its black grotesque negrito and sensual mulata; but I was confident that if a rumba were started at Carmelo, the shimmy would resemble the spasmodic vibrations of a frigid St. Vitus dance. The men and women doing it, galvanized by drink and the distance from their responsibilities, animated by the Cuban air, were prodigiously abandoned. They were, mostly, commercial gentlemen and stiff brokers investigating sugar securities, or the genial obese presidents and managers of steamship companies. The presidents, the managers and brokers, were invariably accompanied by their wives, who, for the most part, endeavored to re-create the illusions and fervors of earlier days; but heaven knew from where came the women for whom the representatives of Yankee merchandise were responsible.
Their origins were as mysterious as their age—strange feminine derelicts stranded by temperament and mischance, caught in the destructive web of the tropics. The dresses they wore were either creations or makeshifts, but their urbanity was as solidly enamelled as their hair was waved or marcelled. There was still another variety—I had seen them before at expensive fishing camps—tightly skirted, permanently yellow-haired, with stony faces and superfine diamonds. Drunk or sober, their calmness was never changed by so much as a flicker; they caught sail fish in the Gulf Stream, danced, ate, talked, and now, certainly, were flying, with the same hard imperturbability and display, in gold mesh bags, of their unlimited crisp money in high denominations—the granite women on the wall of the Gallego Club.
* * *
My interest, however, in the American in Havana had vanished, my position in life, avoidance rather than protest, and I surrendered him to the hospitality of Cuba and the gambling concessions. I wanted, from then on, only the local scene: there were cities where the foreigners, the travelers, made an inseparable part of the whole, but this was not true of Havana; it remained, in spite of the alien clamor, singularly undisturbed, intact, in essence. But a few streets, a plaza or two, knew the sound of English, and beyond these the voices, the stores, the preoccupations, were without any recognition of other people or needs. I began to wander farther from the cafés of the Parque Central, the open familiarity of the sea, and found myself in situations where, in my lack of Spanish, I was limited to the simplest, most plastic, desires.
It was in this manner that I found ear-rings which I secured with a sense of treasure—they were in the shop of a woman who sold embroidered linen from Madeira and the Canary Islands, lying haphazard in the lid of a paste-board box. The patio opened directly from the front room, the store, an informal assemblage of dull white folded cloths and frothy underclothes, and outside a very large family indeed was eating the noon breakfast while a pinkly naked pointer dog lay on the cool tiles with his feet extended stiffly upward.
I was paying for some towels, and regretting—in a singular composite of inappropriate words and banal smiles—the interruption of the meal, when I saw the ear-rings; and immediately, in the face of all the warning and advice wasted on me, I exclaimed that I wanted them. At this they were laid on the counter, a reasonable price murmured, and the transaction was over. I gathered that they had been left for sale by some member of an old Cuban house, perhaps by a Baeza y Carvajal or Nuñez: they were of pale hand-carved and drawn gold, aged gold as yellow as a lemon—one pair of open circles an inch in diameter, with seed pearls; the other the shape of small delicate leaves, with pearls and topazes.
A store unmarked in exterior but surprising within attracted me by some Chinese-Spanish shawls, mantones, in a dusty show-case; and I discovered a short, heavily-built Spaniard stringing the hair of a wig against a background of scintillating costumes for the carnivals, balls, and masques. We were unable to understand each other, his wife wrinkled her forehead in desperation over my Spanish; and then, gesticulating violently, she vanished to reappear with a neighbor, a woman who seemed to have suffered all the personal misfortunes reserved for school teachers, who made intelligible a small part of what we said.
They had, it developed, other shawls, shawls worth my attention; one, in particular, finer even than any of Maria Marco's. This engaged me at once, for Maria Marco was the prima donna of a Madrid company which had sung in the United States two years before, and which had given me, perhaps, as great pleasure as anything I had seen on the stage. But not so much for the singing—it had been the dancer, Doloretes, who captivated me, a woman as brilliant as the orange-red shawl draped before me over a chair, and suddenly, tragically, dead in New York.
The wig-maker had had charge of the wardrobe of The Land of Joy, and he assured me again that not Maria Marco.... Abruptly there was spread the sinuous fringed expanse of a blazing green shawl heavily embroidered in white flowers. I had never encountered a clearer, more intense green or a whiter white; and, before I had recovered from the delightful shock of that, a second shawl of zenith blue was flung beside it. The body of the crêpe-de-chine, the weight of its embroidery, the beautiful knotting of the short fringe—long fringe was an error—and their sheer loveliness, made them more desirable than jewels; and, prepared to buy them at once at the price of whatever fiction anyone wanted me to write and would pay absurdly for, I was lifting their heavy folds when a third mantone was produced burning with all the gorgeous and violent colors imaginable.
It was, I suppose, magenta—a magenta of a depth and wickedness impossible for any but Eastern dye; the magenta of a great blossom of hell—and it was embroidered with flowers like peonies, four spans across, in a rose that was vermilion, a vermilion that was scarlet; and the calyxes were orange and gamboge, emerald and peacock blue and yellow. There were, too, golden roses, already heavy and drooping with scent in the bud, small primitive blossoms with red hearts, dark green leaves, and dense maroon coronals starred in white. The dripping fringe was tied in four different designs....