There was, for example, a girl so blanched that I saw she wasn't white at all; her face, even without its drenching of powder, was the color of the rice-paper cigarette she smoked, walking indolently by; and her hair was a blazing mass of undyed red. Her features, her nose, and the pinched blue corners of her eyes, the crinkling tendency of her piled hair—its authenticity unmistakable in a strong vivid sheen—showed the secret that lay back of her exotic appalling splendor. Her progress across the patio was a slender undulation, and her gaze was fixed, her attention lost, in an abstraction to which there was no key. No imagination could have pictured such a striking figure nor placed her so exactly in the ultimate setting:
Here she was artificial—there were long jet ear-rings against her neck—and savage. In her silk stocking, I had every reason to suspect, there was a knife's thin steel leaf; but who could predict the emotions, no—instincts, to which it was servant? Who, trivial with the trivialities of to-day, could foretell, trifling with her, what incentive might drive the steel deep up under his arm? Hers would be a dreadful face to see, in its flaming corona, in the last agonizing wrench of consciousness.
Seated, and talking earnestly to a Cuban with worried eyes, was a small round brown girl in candy green, whose feet in childish kid slippers and soft hands bore an expression of flawless innocence. Clasped above an elbow was an enamelled gold band, such as youth no longer wore, with a hinge and fine gold chain securing the lock. She touched it once, absent-mindedly, and I wondered what was its potency of association; when, at a turn of her wrist, she drained a glass of brandy, an act of revealing incongruity. She was, I recognized from her speech, Spanish, from the Peninsula; and another, who told me that her city was Bilbao, dispassionately, for a little, occupied my bench. Bilbao, she explained, was not beautiful ... a place of industry and money. Nor was she charming, she was too harsh; but her personality had an unmistakable national flavor, like that of Castell de Remey wine. I was relieved when she rose abruptly and disappeared into the entresol, where the piano was still being intermittently played.
The screen door to a room swung open, and a large rosy creature; negligent and sleepy, appeared momentarily, gazing with a yawn, a flash of faultless teeth, over the assemblage. She was without a dress, but her hair was intricately up, and a froth of underclothes with knots of canary yellow ribbons and yellow clocked stockings made a surprising foreground for the painfully realistic Crucifixion hanging on the wall within. The cross was ebony and the figure in a silver-like metal, the Passion portrayed by a gaunt rigidity of suffering. The screen closed on the tableau of contrast, and the patio resumed its appearance of a vaguely distorted formal occasion.
Whatever my feelings should have been, there was no doubt that—if for the extreme pictorial quality alone—my interest was highly engaged. My interest and not my indignations! I was not, it must be admitted, commendably outraged, or filled with the impulse to rescue, to save, anyone, however young. I seriously questioned my ability to offer salvation, since I lacked the distinctly sustaining conviction of superiority; I couldn't, offhand, guarantee anything. Suppose, for argument, I took one—the youngest—and haled her away from her deplorable situation: what was open to her, to us? Would she have preferred, stayed for an hour in, any of the tepid conventional Magdalen homes, if there were such establishments in Havana?
I had a vision of appearing with her wrapped in a frivolous cloak, before the experienced wisdom of the Inglaterra manager, in the corridor of American salesmen, among the wives of the vice-presidents of steamship companies, and explaining that I was delivering my companion from the wage of death. I should have been, and very properly, put under restraint and Dr. Lainé hurriedly summoned. In all probability, and with the utmost discretion, they'd have sent Pilar, or Manuelita, back to the patio with the doors, explaining to her that I was demented.
There were, undoubtedly, better places for girls of fifteen, and they would have been the first to choose them if a choice had been possible—some would have been wives and some opera singers and all, with wishing so free, uncommonly beautiful. I had an idea that a number of them would have gone no further than the last, and, as well they might, left the rest to chance. But their ideas of beauty must have been stupid compared to what they actually possessed.
There was a girl with a trace of Chinese in the flattened oval of her countenance, and heavy black hair, as severe as a metal casing, redolent with fascination. She sat withdrawn from the others with her hands clasped in the lap of a fine white dress. She was delicate, but not thin, though her neck was so slender that the weight of her head seemed bent a little forward. I had never before seen skin so faintly and evenly golden; there wasn't a flush, a differently shaded surface, anywhere visible. A sultry air hung about her mouth, the under lip brushed with carmine. Her eyes, lowered and almost shut, were large, and their lids were as smooth as ivory. But she wasn't, otherwise, suggestive of that; she more nearly resembled the magic glow of an apple of Hesperides.
If I had encountered her twenty years earlier, my experience would have been richer by a glimpse of her involved image-like charm. She was, conceivably, to the superficial West, dull: it was evident that she almost never talked—the girls about were not her friends—but she had qualities, aspects, infinitely preferable to a flow of words. I should have asked of her hardly more than, at present, she was, sitting quite a distance from me and fundamentally unaware of my existence. I debated whether she would be more attractive in the sleeve coat and jade pins of China or in her virginal white muslin.... That now was the circumference of my duty toward her—to put her in such colors, such surroundings, as would infinitely multiply her mystery.
It was, I realized, time for me to leave—I wasn't Rogelio Mola in his youth—and I paid the inconsequential price of the drinks I had ordered. There were adieux, as civil and impersonal as my welcome, and the door to the street was opened to let me, together with a breath of the scented powder, out. The arcade before me sounded for a moment with the smooth falling of a latch, and then all trace of the near presence of so much lightness was obliterated. In memory it seemed slightly unreal, a dangerous fantasy of murmurs and subdued, knife-like passions—the bleached soul of Africa with massed red hair; a frivolity of yellow ribbons against a silver tormented Christ; the inertia of the East in a heavy-eyed child; but, to balance this, I remembered the girl, like a harsh native wine, from Bilbao, an industrial city and very rich: she restored to the scene its ordinary normal reality.