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The high empty austerity of my room enveloped me in a happy tranquillity; its effect was exactly that of increasing age, substituting for the violent contrasts of life an impersonal spacious whiteness. I very placidly prepared for the cool fresh linen of my bed, my mind filled with fresh cool thoughts. More definitely than ever before I was accepting and accommodating myself to the passage of time. I was not only reconciled to having left forty forever behind, but I welcomed a release from the earlier struggles of resentment and desire. The joys of youth, or anyhow in my case, had been out of proportion to their penalties: I had failed at school, at the academies of art, and, more conspicuously still, as a citizen. I was even incapable of supporting myself, a task so easy that it was successfully performed by three quarters of the fools on earth.
The failure as a painter was serious, but I had never had the least interest in those qualities included in the term a good citizen. I knew nothing about the government of the United States, and made no effort to find out; as an abstraction it had reality for me, but as a reality no substance. The priceless right of vote I neglected for whoever it was in the Republican machine that regularly discharged that responsibility for me. All that interested me, that I deeply cared for, was first the disposal of paint on stretched canvas and then the arrangement of words with a probable meaning and possible beauty.
An extremely bad period, that, when I tried to write without knowledge or support, reaching from twenty until well after thirty, when I managed to sell a scrap of prose. From then until forty the time had gone in a flash, a scratching of the pen: it seemed incredible that the seven books on a shelf bearing my name had been the result of so brief, so immaterial, a time. Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba, gazing peacefully into the dim expensive space of a room in the Hotel Inglaterra, congratulating myself on the loss, the positive lapse, of what was called men's most valuable possession.
No better place for the trying of my sincerity than Havana existed; no other city in the world could so perfectly create the illusion of complete irresponsibility, of happiness followed for its own sake, as an end, or as the means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and plazas and promenades, its alternating sparkle and languor, like flags whipping in the wind or drooping about their staffs, always conveyed a spirit of holiday and of a whole absence of splenetic censure. At the bottom of this the climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days and nights stirring with a breeze through the galleries, concentrated the mind and body on pleasure.
Night had always been the time for gaiety, when the practical was veiled in shade; and Havana responded with an inimitable grace to the stars. It was constructed for night, like a lunar park of marble and palms and open flooding radiance; with, against that, streets packed with darkness and doors of mystery to which clung the faint breath of patchouli. The air was instinct with seduction, faintly touched by the pungency of Ron Bacardi and limes, and bland with the vapors of delightful cigars. The clothes, too—the white linens and flannels and silks of the men; the ruffled dresses on the balconies, the flowery laces, like white carnations, in the automobiles; the wide hats of Paris and the satin slippers tied about the ankles, with preposterous heels; the fluttering fans—all, all were in the key of light sharp emotion, of challenge and invitation and surrender.
Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana, any philosophy in the face of that charm, was unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a farther development of this, tacitly left to my own devices and thoughts, as if there were a general perception of my remoteness from the affair in hand. I was suffered to come and go without notice; no one, much, spoke to me; even those not unaware of the possibility of a book, of San Cristóbal de la Habana, in which their city would find praise, were hardly stirred to interest. The moment to go to Havana was youth, the moment for masked balls and infidelity and champagne: its potency for me lay in its investment of memories; I regarded it as a spectacle set in the tropics. I was an onlooker and not a participant. But I had, as I have shown, no regret; I had become reconciled not only to the fleetness of time, but equally to the fact that my rôle was necessarily a spectator's. Hour after hour, year after year, I sat writing at the low window which looked out over my green terrace and clipped hedge, to the road, to life, beyond.
Above everything, then, I was satisfied with the Havana I knew. From the standpoint of actuality my comprehension was limited—I was familiar with only a certain narrow part of the city, for it was my habit to go back to what I had found rather than discover the new—perhaps ten streets and a handful of houses, parks, and cafés. Too much to get into a score of books. What I had lost, I thought further—if, indeed, I had ever possessed it—was a warm personal contact such as I should have had dancing with a lovely girl. I never danced, but remained outside, philosophically, gazing at the long bright whirling rectangles.
At the Inglaterra there were many men older than myself who danced persistently and had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too, wore flowers in their coats, but aggressive and not reminiscent blooms. They formed most of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't much youth among them, but I didn't envy them in the slightest. They were, if possible, more absurd than the women unmindful of thickening waists and dulled eyes. Their ardor was febrile and their power money; and every time they escorted with a quickened step their charmers past young dark men, the charmers glanced back appealingly. It was different with the Cubans, who regarded such things more naturally, and did not, practically, in consequence, get drunk.
The noise from San Rafael Street never slackened, the clamor of the mule-drivers and the emptying cans of refuse took the place of the motor signals; the slats of my lowered shutters showed streaks of dawn. I turned once, it appeared, and the room was filled with indirect sunlight, the hands of my watch were at ten. It was eleven before I was dressed, with the morning cup of black coffee empty on a table; at twelve I had breakfast, and until five I idly read. The evening as well was idle—a thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvious and active standards. I thought, with no impulse to return, of the house near the Arsenal, which had, in effect, been open for centuries and which, unless life were purified, would never close. The purity I meant was not a limitation of passion, but its release from obscene confines. It didn't matter what I meant and, again, I was becoming too serious ... or not serious about the correct things. There was perpetually the danger of being overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early flight, by the influences, the promptings, of my heredity and strong first associations. What an amazing climax to my records of chiffon textures and moods of chiffon that would be: shouting the creed of a bitter Scots induration from the informal pulpits of the streets! Or I might publish, to the dismay of every one intimately concerned, a denunciatory sermonizing book. But what the subject was wouldn't matter, as it had not mattered with Jeremy Taylor, if it were written with sufficient beauty. Disagreeable books, too, in spite of the accepted contrary belief, were always very highly esteemed.