I made, however, some effort to find a billiard academy, with the hope of seeing the professional games and their audiences built up on the four sides of the tables, common to the Continent; but if there were any in Havana, they, too, eluded me. I hoped to see bearded champions embrace each other after chalking their cues and then drive the ivory balls in red and white angles across the deep green or nurse them about the intersections of the balk lines. It was very different in America, where the billiard parlors were a part of hotel life—great rooms with the level green of the tables fogged in smoke through which the lights resembled the diminished moons of Saturn; the audience, entirely masculine, seated on the high chairs about the walls.
The types of women lingering outside, waiting patiently on convenient benches, were far different from the Latins. Occasionally a youth would put up his cue, dust the chalk from his fingers, assume his accurately fitted coat, his soft brown hat, and go out to some girl with whom he would plunge into a subdued council marked by a note of expostulation. Strange youth and unpredictable girl! A term of endearment would escape, there'd be a quick clinging of hands; and, from an imitation gold purse, some money would be transferred to an engulfing pocket.
But the men of Havana, it seemed, were quite contented to talk, to sit in a café over refrescos or in a parque with nothing at all but cigars, and discuss eternally, with a passionate interest, the details of their politics and city. Their contact with life at every point was vivid and, in expression anyhow, forceful; they argued in a positive tone to which compromise, agreement, appeared hopelessly lost; and there was in the background the possibility of death by quarreling. That, in itself, gave their whole bearing a difference from the conduct of a land where a drubbing with fists was the worst evil to be ordinarily expected. They looked with contempt on a blow, the retaliation of stevedores, and we regarded with disgust a concealed weapon. But where we might still, in simpler places, defend what was locally called purity with pistols, no one, to-day, took his politics seriously.
Politics, in the United States, was looked on with cynical indifference, where it was not a profession, but in Cuba it was invariably the cause of fiery oratory and high tempers. This had been true of America; even in my own memory, in the Virginia Highlands, shotguns had been out for a difference of principals; but patriotism of that stamp had fallen away before civilization, as it was optimistically termed—the end finally brought about by prohibition. Discussion in general, that rose in such volume on the Cuban night, had little part farther north; my own friends, the men specially, almost never said anything except as a direct statement; we never met to talk.
They had a particular, a concrete, interest in living, but no general. Further than that, there was almost no individuality of opinion; the subjects which made good conversation were definitely and arbitrarily settled, closed. To open them, to challenge public opinion, was not to invite argument, but to send men away to the greater safety, the solidity, of the herd. A good story, the humor of the latrine, was a better key to respectability than an honest doubt. For those reasons I wanted to join the arguments, the orations really, flooding the circles of green-painted iron chairs on the Havana plazas; and, solitary, I passed envying the ingenuous welding dissent.
I imagined myself suddenly and completely changed into a Cuban, slight and dark, in white linen, with my hat, a stiff English straw, carefully laid beside me on a ledge of the paving, smoking a cigar of rough shape but excellent tobacco. Not rich, certainly, but securely placed in life! I was, in fancy, the proprietor of a small yet thoroughly responsible oculist's establishment on Neptuno Street. Since I was no longer young, and a member of organized society, with a patron or two from the Prado, I was conservative, but little heated by patriotism; and in favor, rather than not, of annexation to the United States. My private view was that Cuba hadn't been conspicuously worse off under Spain than liberated. The politics of the present, when office-seekers descended to the ñañigos.... Here was the substance of violent argument and recriminations; the voices, the ideals, of young men beat on me in a high indignant storm; the names of Cuban patriots, martyred students, and Spanish butchers were shouted in my ears. Sacred blood flowed again in retrospect, which should never be allowed to sink infertile; but when the words Free Cuba were pronounced I waved my cigar with hopeless derision.
* * *
How significant it was, I thought, that, in imagination, I had pictured myself at fifty. I saw the Havana oculist clearly; his name, by all means, was Rogelio, Rogelio Mola, and he had a heavy grey moustache across his lean brown face which gave him an air of gravity that largely masked the humor, the satire, in his quick black eyes: Spanish eyes with no perceptible trace of the soft iris of Africa. It was past one o'clock when his tertulia scattered, and I accompanied him toward his home—walking to get rid of the stiffness of long sitting—over Dragones Street, in the direction of Vedado. Not yet, never now, would he have a house in Vedado itself; that was reserved for the bankers, planters, and Americans; but he was nicely situated in a new white dwelling of the approved style, overlooking a common that in turn commanded the sea.
The approved style was white plaster, a story and a half high, with an impressive portico—a portico, attached to a small private residence, that would have done honor to a capitol building. There was but little ground, principally extended in a lawn across the front, and banked, against the house, with the spotted leaves of croton plants, purple climbing Fausto, and Mar-Pacifico flowers deeply crimson. He had, it was plain from his walk, a touch of rheumatism, of sciatica really, and he halted in the Plaza de Dragones to press his thin hand to a leg and curse, by the Sacred Lady of Caridad, the old age overtaking him.
That, it seemed to me, would not carry his mind toward his dwelling, his wife grown inordinately fat, and their three daughters, all long ago asleep; no, it would send his thoughts backward, over the way he had come—not from the Parque Central, but from youth. He would brush his moustache reminiscently, I was confident, at a train of gallant memories, chiefly of New York, where, on the pier of a fruit importing house, he had spent some tremendous months. That experience had given him an advantage, an authority, in everything that touched the great republic, and lent his politics an additional sagacity, his cynicism an edge difficult to turn. He had intended to stay in America, a journey to Havana was to have been but a temporary affair; but there he had attached himself to a wife, the daughter of a grinder of lenses.... And here he was at fifty, going back, after listening to a lot of nonsense in the Parque, to his family—in the general direction, too, of the cemetery.