San Cristóbal de la Habana

by Joseph Hergesheimer

This, it seemed to me, was totally unnecessary, for a wickeder rooster I was convinced never lived. He was deliberate in his tactics, unwilling to be robbed of his pleasure by a chance coup de grace, and confined himself to the beak. Soon his opponent leaned helplessly against the wall of the pit, while the victor methodically pecked him to death in small bloody pieces. The negro's face, couched on a charcoal-black palm, was as immobile as green bronze; but the white was positively epileptic with triumph. And, when the defeated bird sank in a spoiled dead knot, he picked his up and, with expressions of endearment, sucked clear its angry eyes. The preliminaries were again gone through with, and two large handsome roosters were confronted by each other. As the surging clamor beat about them I saw that one was undecided in his opinion of what promised. He flapped his wings doubtfully; and then, as the other made a short rush forward, he turned and ran as fast as his shorn legs could carry him. This, considering the contracted round space of his course, was very fast indeed; the second, pursuing him with the utmost energy, was unable to get closer than a fleet dab at the stripped tail. It was a flight not without a desperate humor; but this, it was clear, was appreciated by no one besides me.

The execrations, the screams, that followed the retreating bird were beyond belief; the entire banked audience was swept by a passion that left some individuals speechlessly lifting impotent fists. Unaffected by this, the rooster, slightly leaned toward the center of gravity, went around and around the pit with an unflagging speed that should have commanded an independent admiration for itself. Occasionally the pursuer, in a feat of intelligence, cut directly across the sawdust, and a collision threatened ... but it never quite arrived. I lost interest in the hurled curses, the hats twisted in excesses of rage, in everything but the duration of the running rooster. It was remarkable; he had settled down to putting all he had of strength and reserve into his single purpose.

He had no will to fight, and, personally understanding and sympathizing with him completely, I hoped his wish would be respected: while he had provided no main, he had faithfully substituted a most unlooked-for and thrilling race; making for all time and nations and breeds of chickens a record for a thousand times around a cock-pit. In some places he would, perhaps, have been released, returned to the eminence of a barn-yard; but not in Cuba. When it had been thoroughly demonstrated that he was uncatchable by his rival, he was incontinently seized and both roosters were carried, panting and bald-eyed, to a subsidiary ring beyond, not half the size of the principal pit, where running, or any discretion, was an impossibility.

I saw him go with regret; he deserved a greater consideration, and I hoped that, metaphorically in a corner, he would turn and be victorious. A new individual, a small brown man in soiled linen, had entered the box, and he at once, in a slow, painful, but intelligible English, opened a conversation with me. He had, he said, a consuming admiration for Americans, and as an earnest of his good will he proposed to let me in on what, in the North, was called a good thing. It was no less than the cautious information that in the next fight a dark chicken, a chicken carrying a betting end as long as the Prado, had been entered by President Menocal's brother. I could, with a wave of the hand, make a small fortune: for himself, he was unfortunate—he possessed but eleven dollars and odd pesetas.

* * *

I made some non-committal remark and turned a shoulder on his friendliness for Americans, conscious of a distinct annoyance at having been mistaken for, well—a tourist. There was no inherent inferiority in that transient state of being; but it was a characteristic of the settlers of any given place—settlers of at least forty-eight hours—that they should regard with tolerant amusement the new and the uninformed. He did, I thought, my clothes, my cigar, my whole air of sophisticated comprehension, an injustice; he should have recognized that I was not an individual to accept readily public confidential information.

The birds were brought in and weighed, and the person in the box with me and the billowing white embroidery and carpet slippers excitedly indicated a lean cream-colored rooster with brown points. I fancied the other more, and thought something of betting on him when the main began—the brown bird of the brother of Menocal flashed forward, launched himself into the air with a clash, and drove both spurs through the head before him. It had occupied something more than five but less than ten seconds. Too bad, a deferential voice murmured in my ear, that I hadn't taken advantage of such an excellent opportunity to get the better of all the too-wise ones. With but eleven dollars and some silver he had been cramped.... My interest in cock-fighting faded before an annoyance that drove me away from the Puente de Agua Dulce, calculating how much, at the odds I missed, I should have gained.

Money won at sheer gambling, at games of chance which involved no personal skill or effort, always seemed hardly short of miraculous to me—magical sums produced at the waving of a hand. Their possession gave me a disproportionate pleasure and glow of well being; they seemed to be the mark of a special favor; the visible gesture, the approbation, of fortune and chance. I had had a lucky night at the Kursaal in Geneva, playing baccarat, and the changier, a silver chain about his neck, had reconverted my bowl of chips into heaped gold and treasury paper. But with that exception, and for some small amounts, I was unlucky. The occasion just past was an illustration—I was never really disastrously overtaken, but equally I never reached sensational heights.

There were, certainly, numerous places in Havana for roulette, and always the American Club for auction bridge and poker; but I found my way to none of these: there were men who could hear the soundless turn of a wheel, soundless but for the fillip of the pith ball on the wood and metal, through the streets and walls of a city; and there were others who, merely pausing in a hotel or club corridor, would immediately form about them all the adjuncts of poker—the cards, the blue and yellow and white chips, the bank president, the shifty polite individual with pink silk sleeves and a rippling shuffle, the rich youth.... But, indebted, I suppose, to my spectacled benevolent appearance, such occasions let me pass unnotified.