San Cristóbal de la Habana

by Joseph Hergesheimer

That was lost now, I understood, a vanished custom, killed by self-consciousness; but it would have been a fine thing to hear approaching and receding through the dusk, a stirring resinous volume or a mere vibrant echo, a dying whisper. Perhaps that, a dying whisper, would be the solving of the whole tragic difficulty—disease and winter and relentless natural laws. The latter moved with great deliberation through unlimited centuries, but the impatience of men demanded instant release from trouble. They wanted black black and white white, with no transition, no blurring of the edges; this was their dream, but they constantly defeated it, betrayed their ideal. Yes, it might be that the humility of that defeat, in the far future, would accomplish a universally white city. Only one other way offered: a different humanity from any which had yet appeared outside rare individuals ... but that vision seemed, to me, as fantastic as the sentence in Carabalíe Bricamó that gave it expression, Eruco en llenison comunbairán abasí otete alleri pongó—We of this world are all together. The truth was, honestly at heart, that I couldn't commit myself to all, or even a quarter, of what this would have demanded. Impersonally I was able to see that, as an idea, it was superb, I realized that something of it must inform my pages; but it was useless to pretend that I could begin to carry it out or that I was, in practice, a Christian. I was tired, and my thoughts grew confused, but dimly in my mind was again the consciousness of the remote fate of the creative writer, an individual without even the desire to be a part of that for which he cried.

* * *

Certainly I had no marked love of humanity the following morning, caught with a small mob in a narrow passage of the wharf where I was waiting to board the steamer for Key West. I was between the water and a wooden partition, the heat was savage, and a number of youthful marines, returning home from Camagüey, were indulging in a characteristic humor—the dealing of unsuspected blows, of jarring force, among themselves. They shoved each other, in a crowd shoulder to shoulder, disregarding entirely the indirect results of their vigor, and exchanged threats of fulminating violence. They were not more annoying than the others, but only more evident; and, as the advertised time of departure was past by an hour, and then a second hour, and the sun found its way into our walled space, even the marines subsided. Every trace of dignity, in that heat, ran away from the people about me. While, on the whole, they were uncomplaining, even relatively considerate of others' discomforts, wondering, with weary smiles, when the boat would be off, I had no such kindly promptings.... I hated them all, the ugliness of the women and the men's dull or merely sharp faces, with an intensity that wasn't normal. When I was very young indeed, scarcely past two, I had been nearly crushed in a throng after the Sesquicentennial parade in Philadelphia; long afterward I had been, to all practical purposes, asphyxiated in a train that broke down in an Apennine tunnel; as a result, I had an unreasoning fear of crowded bodies or limited space; and this dread, before long, on the Havana wharf, turned into an acute aversion for every individual and thing about me.

The surrounding insistent good nature developed in flashes of exchanged homely wit, varied by the attitudes of restraint, and, of them both, I couldn't tell which I resented more. The present position of the waiting people, the long exposure to the intolerable sun, was the result of their patience; of that and their personal inefficiency reflected in their official management. All the bad governments in the world, the dishonesty and universal muddles, were nothing more than monuments to the immeasurable stupidity and greed of the people; they were betrayed politically not by powerful and unscrupulous parties and men, but by themselves; perpetually and always by their own laziness and superstition and jealousy.

The Cubeños, the original inhabitants of Cuba, were parcelled in the bondage of encomiendas, exterminated by the passion of the Spanish Crown for gold; when they had been sacrificed, Africa was raked by slavers for labor in the mines and planting; beneath every movement, instigated by hope or supported by returns, riches were the incentive and power. Men had never, within history and their secret hearts, cared for anything else: an ineradicable desire. There was a facile public gabble about the qualities of the spirit, about soul; but the solid fact of money, both as an abstraction and what conspicuously it brought, was what the people worshipped, wanted, what they schemed or stole for, or in the service of which they performed the most heroic toil.

This was not, necessarily, an ignoble or negligible pursuit, but it was corrupted by an attending hypocrisy which forced a fervent denial, the pretense of an utterly different purpose, to be worn like a cloak. It was possible that, admitted, the sovereignty of gold would be the most beneficial rule applicable to man. It was preëminently the symbol, the signature, of power; with the late sugar crops it had revolutionized Cuba. Havana was for the moment, in a very strong sense, the capital of the world, and the visible mark of that was the stream of automobiles on the Prado and Malecón; individually, money was counted by the million—the recognition, the desired reward, of the fact that Cuba controlled a necessity of life. The instinct to profit by such turns of fortune was deeper than any charitable impulse; there was a tendency to speculate in wheat more general than the impulse to give loaves to the starving.

There was a sudden surge toward the gang plank of the City of Miami, and I was borne onto the steamer, away from Havana, in an exasperated and bitter spirit. I had entered the harbor happily, saturated by its beauty, but I was leaving blind to the marble walls on the blue water. However, it was cooler on an upper deck; and with my back uncompromisingly turned on humanity, on my fellow passengers over a sea like a tranquil illusion of respite between stubborn realities, I picked out from the panorama of the city across the harbor, diminishing in its narrow entrance, familiar buildings and marks. Havana vanished, I thought, far more rapidly than it had come into view; soon nothing of Cuba could be seen but the dark green hills and thinly printed silhouettes of mountains. I had it, though, in my memory; Havana was now woven into the fibre of my being.

The Inglaterra Hotel took its place with all the remembered spots where I had lived: the bare pine-sealed room in the Virginia mountains, the tall narrow house in Geneva, the courtyard in the Via San Gallo, the brick house in a suburb from which, in a rebellion against every circumstance of my life, I had escaped. I recalled days on end when I had tried to write without the ability to form a single acceptable sentence, when the floor was heaped and littered with pages crushed and flung away. Then, it had seemed, I should get nowhere, and see, do, nothing.... Havana was a singularly lovely city. A rush of small mementos of its life flooded my mind—the aroma of the cigars, the coolness of the Telegrafo Café and the savor of its Daiquiri cocktails, the burning strip of sunlight that, at noon, found its way into Obispo Street. It was still possible to get Ron Bacardi in the United States. I was carrying back a large provision of exceedingly fine cigars, not from the Larrañaga factory, but a slender Corona, a shape specially rolled for a discrimination as delicate as any in Cuba. Yet, away from Havana, they wouldn't taste the same; in the United States they'd deteriorate; and, where I lived, there were no fresh, no emerald-green limes, and without them a Daiquiri was robbed of its inimitable flavor.

But what, more than those, I should miss was the atmosphere of Havana itself, the gay urbanity and festive lightness of tone. It had almost wholly escaped the modern passion for reform changing America, pretty much all the western world, into a desert of precept and correction; in many senses Havana was an oasis in an aridity spreading day by day. Any improvement wouldn't occur during my life—the habit of lies and self-delusion had become a fundamental part of society—and all I could hope for was the discovery of rare individuals and cities in which existence was more than a penalty for having been born. I wanted them as a relaxation, as short escapes from a tyranny from which, really, I was powerless to turn: