Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write, were composed, now, not so much from among the brasses, the tympani, as from the violins. The great majority, like the great books, were dedicated to the primary chords; but my reaching the former had been always hopeless. I didn't mind this, for I told myself that, while the structure of approbation I had gathered was comparatively modest, its stones and masonry were admirable; it was, if not a mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on earth—what was in England called, I believe, a freehold. It was mine, and there was no lease dependent on the good will—or on my subserviency—of any landlord.
* * *
Most of this went through my mind as I sat looking at my trunk, open on end in an alcove near the door, for I was gathering my clothes and thoughts in preparation for leaving Havana. One thing only that I wished to see now remained—the danzon at the National Theatre. I kept out a dark suit, one that would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's box; for I had been told that it was desirable to avoid unnecessary attention. There was, briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted—I had heard the same thing so often before without subsequent justification—but I could believe it possible if there was any violent discharge of primitive emotion. Here the spirit of Africa burned remote and pale, but it was still a tropical incomprehensible flame.
A strip of red carpet led from the outer steps, across a large promenade, to the circular wall of the theatre; and though it was past eleven, the ball hadn't yet assumed an appearance of life. But just within the entrance a negro band began suddenly to play, and in the music alone I immediately found the potent actuality of danger. I was without the knowledge necessary to the disentangling of its elements: there were fiddles and horns and unnatural kettle drums, and an instrument made from a long gourd, with a parallel scoring for the scrape of a stick. The music was first a shock, then an exasperation hardly to be borne, but finally it assumed a rhythm maddening beyond measure.
It was Africa and something else—notes taken from the Moors, splitting quavers of Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that might have been the agonized voice of the first Cubeños; with an unspeakable distortion, a crazy adaptation, of scraps of to-day. There was no pause, no beginning or end, in its form; it went on and on and on, rising and falling, fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and then a blasting discord—the savage naked utterance of a naked savage lust; it was a music not of passion, but of the frenzy of rape. Nothing like it would have been possible in writing, allowed in painting; only music was free to express, to sound, such depths. Nothing but music could have conveyed the inarticulate cries of the stirred mire that flooded the marble space of the opera house. It had lost the simplicity of its appropriate years, the spring orgies in the clearings of early forests; time had made it hideously menacing, cynical, and corrupt.
At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro woman with a wheedling tainted manner tried to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger and pale, their faces coated with rice powder, went past in dragging satins. They were chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened cheeks and dead-looking mat-like hair, their coffee-colored breasts and white kid gloves, gave them an extraordinary incongruity; and behind them, as sharp as the whisper of their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered. Leaning forward on the rail of my enclosure, I gazed down over the floored expanse of the auditorium:
The stage was set with the backdrop and wings of a conventional operatic design—a scene that would have served equally Aïda or La Favorita: it towered, like a faded dream of pseudo-classic Havana, into the theatrical heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and charcoal grey, of loggias and peristyles and fountains; while in close order about its three sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live border of dancers. They were of every color from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster, to utter blackness. The men, for the most part, were light, some purely Spanish, the negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I could see no indisputably white women. There was a girl in a mantone of bright contrasting colors, a high comb and a rose in her hair, about whom there was a question. However, her partner was one of the few full negroes there; and, as they revolved below my box, it seemed that her skin had a leaden cast.
The danzon itself had, at first, the appearance of a sustained gravity: it was danced slowly, in very small space, following the music with arbitrary reverses, and pausing. There might have been, to the superficial view, a restraint almost approaching dignity had the dancers been other. The men, without exception, wore their stiff straw hats and smoked cigars through every evolution; and the dresses, the dressing, of the women were fantastic: a small wasted girl, dryly black, had copied the color and petals of a sunflower. As she revolved, her skirt flared out from legs like bent bones, and a hat of raw yellow flapped across her grotesque ebony countenance.
The danzon, for a moment, in spite of the music played continuously and alternately by two orchestras occupying a box on either side of the stage, seemed formal. Then, abruptly, a couple lost every restraint, and their maddened spinning and furious hips tore the illusion to shreds. And slowly I began to be conscious of a poisonous air, a fetid air as palpable as the odors and scents—the breath, the premonition, of the danger of which I had been warned. It lay in an ugly hysteria of rasped emotions that at any illogical accident might burst into the shrillness of a knife. It wasn't dangerous so much as it was abjectly wicked—the deliberate calling up of sooty shapes that had better be kept buried. It was unimportant that the men below me were, in the daytime, commonplace clerks; the women could be anything chance had made them: here, to the spoiled magic of Carabalíe nights, they were evoking a ceremonial of horror.
Personally, since I had no hopes to save or plans to protect, I hadn't the desire, like Sampson, to pull down the pillars of the roof on their debased heads. I enjoyed it remarkably; the more because I saw, scattered among the crowd, figures of unreal and detrimental beauty—a creamy magnificence in creamy satin with a silver band on her forehead; a yellow creature with oblique eyes in twenty white flounces and a natural garland of purple flowers; a thing of ink, of basalt carved by an opulent chisel, on whose body clothes were incidental; and corrupt graces perfect in youth and figure weaving the patterns, the wisdom, of Sodom.