It had been chosen with immense care in the Inglaterra café for bonbons and souvenirs, liqueurs and cigars. How remarkable it was, I had thought, hovering above the case, which contained a bewildering choice of shapes and colors, to be in a land where all the cigars were, in the sense I knew, imported. I hesitated for a minute or more between a Larrañaga and a banquet Corona, and finally decided on the former. It was as long as the cigar called Fancy Tales, but slightly thicker and rolled to a point at either end; and the first breath of its smoke, drifting in a blue cloud away from the window, told me that until then I had known but little of tobacco. Coffee so black that it stained the white shell of its cup; a diminutive glass of Grand Marnier, the distilled last saturation of oranges and fin champagne; and the Larrañaga, the color of oak leaves freshly brown, combined in a transcending magic of contentment.
The point was—my special inhibition as a traveler—that I didn't want to move; I had no wish to speak to anyone or see what, particularly, I should have hurried away to view. That impatience I had served when I was twenty-one, in Naples; a city uniquely planned for morbid and natural curiosity. There the animated frescoes of Pompeii had been posed, at two lire a figure, before my assumption of mature experience. But now, past forty, I was without the ambition and desire to follow the cabs of the American business men who, in the company of patient and fatigued Cubans, were, in the interest of vague appointments, bidding their families elaborate good evenings.
Later it was inevitable that I should get to the theatres, hear whatever music offered, and see all the dancing, Spanish and Cuban, in the city of Havana, but not to-night. My present pleasure was not to be wasted in the bother of movement and a probable mistake. The cigar continued to veil me in its reflective smoke for another half hour, there was more coffee in the pot. The tempered heat of the day lay over me like a spell, like an armor against the chill, the gaunt winds and rain, of the north. The scent of the sprig of orange blossoms was just perceptible, at once faint and laden with the potency of a magical grove.
* * *
The weather, the temperature and special atmospheric envelopment of Havana, was, I was certain, different from any other, its heat modified by the winds that moved across the island at night, at least from this shore, and the days flooded with an incandescent sunlight like burning magnesium. Stirring slowly about my room before breakfast, the slatted shutters bowed against the already blazing day, a thread of cigarette smoke climbing hopelessly toward the far ceiling, I thought of the idiotic popular conviction that the weather was a topic for stupid minds. The reverse, certainly, was true, since, inbound with all the settings of life, all nature, the weather offered an illimitable range of suggestion.
It had been the great discovery of imaginative prose—the novel for which we care most had been largely the result of that gained appreciation; and its absence in older books, placed in a vacuum, entirely accounted for their dry unreality. What, for instance, were the novels of Thomas Hardy but splendid records of the countryside weather, for nature and weather were one. This, more than any other force, conditioned men, stamping them out with an ice age, burning them black in Africa ... setting royal palms by the doors of the Hotel Inglaterra and willows along my lower lawn.
The difference between Havana and West Chester was exactly that difference in their foliage, in the low April green of one and the harsh high fronds of the other. The quality, the weather, that made the trees made equally the men, just as it dictated their lives, the houses they lived in, their industries and planted grains. This was true not only of the country but of the city, too, of George Moore as well as Hardy; for though Moore belonged principally to salons and the discreet interiors of broughams, a good half of the beauty of his pages was due to his response to the quality of spring against a smoke-blackened London wall, the laburnum blossoming in his Dublin garden.
The slightest impression of Havana must be founded on a sensitive recognition of the crystal light and printed shadows which, in addition to its architecture of fact, brought another of sweeping illusion. In the morning the plazas glittered in a complete revelation of every hard carving and leaf and painted kiosk, but later the detail merged in airy diagonal structures of shade. Modified, infrequently, by the gorgeous cumulous clouds drifting from the upward thrust, the anchorage, of the Andes, the entire process of the hours was upset. This was not simply a variation of inanimate surface, it had an exact counterpart in the emotions: bowed by an insuperable blaze or upright in the veiled sun, the attitude of harmony was profoundly affected. The night was altogether separate, a time, I gathered, when it seldom rained; and there was never another city that took advantage of the night like Havana. Released from the resplendent tyranny of the sun, everyone, it appeared, disdaining sleep, lingered in the plazas, the cafés, and along the sea-walls, until dawn threatened. Here the dark was not alone a stage for nocturnal plans and figures: it was without strangeness or fear for the Cubans thronging abroad, on foot and in motors, early and late. The whiteness of the buildings, too, even where they were not illuminated, defined spaces never obscure; the city was never wholly lost, obliterated by the imponderable blackness of the north. All this, every aspect of Havana's being, was the gift—the dangerous gift—of its situation, its weather. The blinding day, the city folded in a sparkling night, like a vision in blanched satin with fireflies in her hair, were nothing more than meteorological.
For myself, my entire attitude was different in the room I now inhabited from the inherent feeling, in New York, of the Algonquin. I was, in white flannels and brown Holland, with roses against the mirror of the bureau, another man; not only my mentality but my physical bearing was changed. Here I was an individual who, moving about for an hour or so in the morning, spent the day until late afternoon in some quiet and cool inner spaciousness. That, I appreciated at once, was one of the comfortable peculiarities of Havana: it was always possible to be cool—in a café with the marble floor sprinkled with water; at the entrance of the Inglaterra, where, however, the chairs were the most uncomfortable in the world; or, better yet, with a book, a naranjada, and pajamas, transiently at home.
For the iced refrescos of Cuba I had been prepared; and at breakfast, though that, I found later, was not its hour, I chose, rather than a naranjada, a piña colado—a glass, nearly as large and quite as thin as possible, of the chilled essence of pineapple. A remarkable, a delightful, concoction. Later I heard the refrescos referred to contemptuously by Americans whose attitude toward the Cubans paralleled their opinion of the local drinks. They elected whiskey, at times condescending to gin, and the effect was portentous. Some sat near me now, with breakfasts of bubbling ham and crisped eggs, lamenting the coffee.