It was sad, and, for a moment, there was a debate, a conflict, in his mind: though his age was beyond denial, and his hip troubled him—but only after he spent an evening on the cold iron chair of a plaza—he showed no signs of having passed the middle of his life. The grey hair was distinguished; Madame Nazabal, who was a Frenchwoman, had assured him of that. The handsome girl in El Corazón de Jesus, the Vedado bakery where English was spoken, flushed when their hands accidentally met over the counter. But this mood, his courage, was fictitious; it sank and left him limping palpably, with an oppressed heart. He was, simply, an old fool, he told himself, vindicating the humorous comprehension of his gaze.
If he wasn't careful, the young men of his establishment, over whom he kept a strict parent-like discipline, would laugh at him behind his back. They were inclined to be wild as it was, and he suspected them of going to the carnival balls, the danzons, in the opera house. God knew that he had seen them in the company of no better than the girls from the cigar factories. When he was younger—young—that dangerous company had given a dance on the last Thursday of every month, except when it fell in Lent, and he had held his place there with the most agile among them, once even pressing an argument with a man who was reputed to have been an espada of Castile. A knife had grazed his throat and slit the left shoulder of his coat through to the skin; the mark remained, a livid welt under his collar, but the assailant had vanished before he could kill him. All memory of the girl had gone; but she was beautiful, he was certain of that, or else why should he have noticed her?
The girls of those days had a—a quality, a manner, lacking in the present. Their hearts had been warmer, they were less mercenary. Rogelio Mola detested mercenary women. Now, as far as he could make out, nothing was possible but rounds of the expensive cafés: the fact was, the girls only wanted to be taken to the Dos Hermanos, or the Little Club, where the Americans could see them, and, perhaps.... Then, in about eighteen eighty, there was some fidelity, some honor, some generosity. There was romance—that had disappeared more utterly than anything else: he was more than a little vague in meaning; his romance was an indefinite state; the glow, in reality, of his own youth.
At that time, in such discussions as had passed this evening, he had been on the side of revolution, of expeditions to the Trocha, secret associations; but simply because his blood was hot, his age appropriate to revolt. He had been, without doubt, difficult; his elders had predicted a cell in Cabañas as an ante-room, a sort of immediate purgatory, to hell. He raised expressive shoulders slightly at the thought of the holy legends: a business for women and priests. The Church, temporarily, had had some rare pasturage; but the fathers were a shade too greedy; they had gobbled up so much that it was necessary to drive them out. Women and priests, priests and women! The latter had suffered no diminution of their privileges; they had too much for which the young men, for all their self-opinion, got nothing or next to nothing in return. Rogelio Mola wondered if the old houses of pleasure were unchanged.
He had not thought of them for years, and he was contemptuous of men of his age who did, still, consider them. Not that he was puritanical and condemned all such institutions, though he had a strong suspicion that they had deteriorated. For the youth of his day they had been very largely places of meeting and conspiracy, where traditionally the sentiment supported attacks on authority. Yet a girl from Lima had betrayed Marío Turafa, his friend, in hiding, to the Spanish Government. It was said that Marío had been deported, perhaps to the very Peru from which came his Delilah, but it was more probable that he had been shot. There had been one whom he, Rogelio, had liked.... Her name came back to him, Ana, and the fact that she sang quite beautifully ... nothing else. The words of a song formed from the melody for a moment audible among his memories:
| "Clavales, clavales |
| de mi Andalucía! |
| Mujeres, mujeres— |
| de la Patria mia!" |
It was evident from this that she had come from Andalusia. Thirty years ago! He wished her the best of luck. Hadn't they been young together, with at least the innocence of true affection? His thoughts turned guiltily to his wife, to his daughters white like flowers of the Copa de Nieva. The twinge in his leg resembled a hot wire; and resolutely he marshalled his attention forward. How dark, how depressing, certain reaches of Havana were, and he pictured the cemetery ghostly, icy, in the night; women, with their confessional, their faith in the forgiveness of sins, were fortunate. Yet no one must say of him that he was a coward, that, at the last, he had been borne into oblivion on the oil of the priests he had disregarded in life. Deep under his skepticism, however, a low inextinguishable hereditary flame of hope burned, independent of his intelligence.
* * *
My mind returned once more to Rogelio Mola as I was standing outside an impassive door, waiting for admittance, not far from the Arsenal. It was the entrance to what he had called a house of pleasure, and, long established in Havana, unknown to America, one that he might easily have frequented in the reprehensible period of youth. I had adequate abstract reasons for my presence, but Rogelio, correctly insistent on a saving generosity of emotion, had needed no ponderous explanation. Indeed, I was there in his interest, since, after all, I had imagined him; I wanted very much to have completely the material of his setting, of the surrounding from which his friend, betrayed by the Peru that had centuries before despoiled Cuba, had been led out to be, doubtless, shot. Not that, pressingly, I felt the need for an excuse, or that I was essentially making a descent. The very bitterness, the revilement in solemn terms, of my early instructions, had, reacting, defeated itself.