I asked its price at once, in order to dispose of what couldn't help being painful in the extreme, and he told me with an admirable appearance of ease and inconsequence. The shop, that had been only half lighted by the door, was now tumultuous with color, with China and Andalusia; the shawl was the Orient and Spain, brutal in its superbness and as exasperating, as audible, as castanets. However I might act, hesitate, visibly, I knew that I'd buy it—in an instant it had become as imperative to me as a consuming vice. It belonged, rightfully, to the mistress of a Zuluoga or of a Portuguese king, to someone for whom money was not even an incident; I couldn't afford it even if I wove it into a story with a trace, a glimmer, of its splendor; but the next day the shawl was in my room.
Oppressed by a sense of monetary insanity not unfamiliar to me—I was very apt to buy an Airedale terrier or a consol table with the sum carefully gathered for an absolute necessity—I set about turning my new possession into paragraphs and chapters; and it occurred to me that it had a justified place in the Havana story I had already, mentally, begun. The polite young men of the time, the decorative youth of all times, were apt to have collectively a passion for a fascinating or celebrated actress; and I saw that such a person—Doloretes—would be important to my plan. Yes, my young figure and his fellows would go nightly to see her dance.
Afterward, crowded about a marble-topped table and helados, they would discuss her every point with fervent admiration. Yet she would be too vivid, too special, to take the foreground—I had wanted no paramount women in the first place—and I decided ... to kill her almost at once, to have her as a memory. My boy, most certainly, would find her shawl exactly as I had; and, bringing it to his room, solemnly exhibit it to his circle. More than that, I realized, it had given me a title, The Bright Shawl. I instantly determined to cast the story in the form of a memory told me by an old man of his youth; and that time, torn by unhappiness, indecision, and hopeless aspirations, should be made, in remembrance, brilliant and desirable, wrapped in the bright shawl which transformed the lost past.
A remarkably good story, I thought enthusiastically; and I fell to speculating if George Lorimer would print it. He would give it, I told myself, a wide margin of chance; but, in writing, uncomfortable necessities often turned up in the course of narrative—I could leave them out, and damn myself, or keep them and, maybe, damn the story in the sense of its making possible my writing at all. Not that Mr. Lorimer personally had any regard for emasculated chapters, but he was addressed primarily to another integrity than mine; our purposes were not invariably coincident. A fact which he, with his energetic candor scoring pretentiousness, had made clear in his generous recognition of where our paths met.
* * *
What was noticeable in The Bright Shawl was that I hadn't gone out for material, but it had come to me, scene by scene, emotion by emotion. I had never been able deliberately to set about collecting the facts for a proposed story; I could never tell what impulse, need, would be strong enough to overcome the laborious effort demanded for its realization in words. For this reason I was free to see what I chose without reference to any ulterior purpose; and when, on a Sunday morning with the heat tempered by a breeze lingering from the night, I started for the cock-fighting at the suburb of Jesus del Monte, I was completely at ease. I had decided in favor of the cock-pit both because it was essentially Cuban and because I had always detested chickens, particularly roosters.
It was a thing of total indifference to me what—with steel spurs or without—roosters did to each other. Alive, they were a constant galling caricature, a crude illuminative projection, of men at their ridiculous worst. Their feathered tails, their crowing, their propensity to search for bits in the dung, their sheer roosterness, together with the sly hypocrisy of hens, had always annoyed me individually. And, rather than not, I looked forward to seeing them victimized by their own belligerent conceit.
I had to leave my cab for an informal way behind some buildings and across grass, and, as I approached a false stucco façade, a determined ringing crowing filled the air. Beyond the arched entrance there was an area of pavement with tables and a limited café service; and, seated near, was a grave individual with a shovel beard and a thoroughly irritated rooster upside down in his lap. He was cementing a natural spur over one that had been injured, and drinking, now and again, from a cup of coffee at his hand. Beyond was the pit, like, as much as anything, a tall circular corn-crib, painted white, with a cupola. There was place for about three hundred, with box-like seats whose low hinged doors opened directly on the sawdust of the arena, more casual chairs, and—as at the pelota—space for standing on the middle tiers. There was a box above the entrance, and another opposite, and this an enormous woman in white embroidery and carpet slippers, and I occupied.
A main had just been finished, and there was a temporary lull in the noise inseparable, in Cuba, from sport. The sawdust was being freshly sprinkled when a negro entered the ring with an animated bag; and, noting the elaborate polished brass scales that hung from the center of the roof, I gathered that the birds were to be weighed. The second was produced, tightly bagged, by a highly respectable-appearing man of unimpeachable whiteness and side whiskers, and the roosters were left to dangle from the yard. It was to be a battle al peso, by weight and equal spurs; the first condition satisfied, the spurs were measured, by a graduated set of pewter tallies; and the uproar was released.
It was deafening—a solid shouting of bets offered in a voice of fury, together with acceptances, repudiations, personalities, and the frenzied waving in air of handfuls of money. The two men with the roosters advanced toward each other and wooden lines laid in the pit, prodding and otherwise increasing the natural ill humor of their birds, and held the shorn heads close for a vicious preliminary peck. The roosters' legs, shaved to an indecent crimson, were bare of hold, every superficial feather had been clipped; and when they hit the sawdust there was a clash as of metal. The methods of their backers were different—the negro, in one of the local coat-like shirts with a multiplicity of useless pockets and plaits, squatted on his heels, impassive, fateful, and African; but the man with the orthodox side-whiskers became at once the victim of a hoarse whispering excitement. As the other's bird reeled drunkenly about—they were badly matched and the main no affair at all—his pallid face flushed and he suggested new atrocities to his champion.