It was doubtless part of the hypnotism of my liking for Havana that reconciled me to the coffee, poured simultaneously with hot salted milk into the cup. I accepted it at once, together with a cut French roll ingeniously buttered. Other efforts were made, through a window, to sell a wallpaper of lottery tickets; the vendor of magazines now put forward the Havana Post, printed in English; the curtains hung motionless, a transparent film on the bright space beyond.
There was nothing I had to do, or see, no duty to myself to fulfill; and, watching the stir of tourist departure, I was thankful for my total lack of uncomfortable incentive. I had, for instance, no intention of ascending the height of Morro Castle, which—I had hardly needed the assurance—included a fatiguing number of stairs; nor of becoming familiar with Cabañas fortress. It had been quite enough to see in passing that long pink wall and know that there were old batteries of cannon embossed with the sovereign names of Spain. There were no picture galleries; and in Havana the churches were rich in neither tradition nor beauty, and the convents of early days had been turned into warehouses. It was, on the whole, a city without obtrusive history; even its first site was on the other side of the island; the wall, except for a fragment or two, had gone; its early aspects were practically absorbed by the later spirit that had captivated me. Here, if ever, was a place in which honesty of mood could be completely indulged.
A state not innocent of danger to the Puritan tradition—lately assaulted with useless vigor—of suppression; for to the Latin acceptance of the whole of life had been added the passions of the tropics. Cuba had cynically realized this, and multiplied a natural frankness with a specialized attention to the northern masculinity I had seen leaving the hotel at odd hours last night. I felt even so soon, with prohibition a reality, that our national prudery was a very unfortunate influence indeed in Havana. The season was at an end—only a few days of the racing remained—so I had missed the obvious worst; but traces of the corruption of the dull, the dull themselves in diminishing numbers, lingered.
Havana, in common with other foreign countries, and with so many golden reasons to the contrary, had no general liking for Americans. The few who had understood Cuba, either living there or journeying with discretion, were most warmly appreciated; and, characteristically, it was they more than the natives who were principally disconcerted by the released waggishness of Maine and Ohio and Illinois. But the majority were merely exploited. There was, certainly, something on the other side of the fence, for the Cubans were morbidly sensitive about their land, their monuments and martyrs, not necessarily impressive to the Anglo-Saxon heritage and temperament. There were fundamental racial differences, with a preponderant ultimate weight in favor of continents as opposed to islands. The fascination Havana had for me wasn't inevitable; I was only considering with regret, æsthetic rather than moral, the effect on Cuba of any prostitution.
* * *
As, in a temporary stoppage of its circular traffic, I walked across the Parque Central, its limits seemed to extend indefinitely, as if it had become a Sahara of pavement exposed to the white core of the sun; and I passed with a feeling of immense relief into the shade of a book-shop at the head of Obispo Street, where the intolerable glare slowly faded from my vision as I fingered the heaps of volumes paper-bound in a variegated brightness of color and design. In any book-shop I was entirely at home, contented; and here specially I was prepossessed with the idea of buying a great number of the novels solely for their covers—in short, making a collection of Spanish pictorial bindings. But the novels, I discovered, were, even in paper, almost a peso each; and since I was reluctant to invest two hundred or more dollars in a mere beginning, the idea vanished. Their imaginative quality, however, the drawing and color printing, were excellent, far better than ours; in fact, we owned nothing at all like them.
They had a freedom of cruelty, a brutality of statement, of truth, absent in American sentimentality: where women were without clothes they were naked, anatomically accounted for, as were the men; and the symbolical representations of labor and injustice were instinct with blood and anguish. A surprising number of stories by Blasco Ibáñez were evident; and it struck me that if I had read him in those casual bright copies, without the ponderous weight of his American volumes and uncritical reputation, I might have found a degree of enjoyment. There were a great many magazines, mostly Spanish, gayly covered but with the stupidest contents imaginable—the bad reproductions of contemporary photographs on vile grey paper; although one, La Esefa, admirably reproduced, in vivid color and titles, the Iberian spirit of the lighter Goya.
Though I had been on narrow streets before, I had never seen one with the dramatic quality of Obispo. Hands might almost have touched across its paved way, and the sidewalks, no more than amplified curbs, hardly allowed for the width of a skirt. It was cooled by shadow, except for a narrow brilliant strip, and the open shops were like caverns. The windows were particularly notable, for they held the wealth, the choice, of what was offered within: diamonds and Panama hats, tortoise shell, Canary Island embroidery, and perfumery. There were cafés that specialized in minute cakes of chocolate and citron and almond paste set out in rows of surprisingly delicate workmanship, and shallow cafés whose shelves were banked with cordials and rons, gin, whiskies, and wine. There were bottles of eccentric shape holding divinely colored liqueurs, squat bottles and pinched, files of amber sauternes, miniature glass bears from Russia filled with Kümmel, yellow and green chartreuse, syrupy green and white menthes, the Cinziano vermouth of Italy, Spanish cider, and orderly companies of mineral waters.
These stores had little zinc-topped bars, and there were always groups of men sipping and conversing in their rapid intent manner. The street was crowded and, invariably allowing the women the wall, it was necessary to step again and again from the sidewalk. They were mostly Americans: the Cuban women abroad were in glittering automobiles, already elaborate in lace and jewels and dipping hats, and drenched in powder. They were, occasionally, when young, extremely beautiful, with a dark haughtiness that I had always found irresistible.
In my early impressionable years it had continually been my fate to be entranced by lovely disagreeable girls with cloudy black hair and skin stained with brown rather than pink. Imperious girls with elevated chins and straight sensitive noses! They had never, by any chance, paid the slightest attention to me; and the Cubans passing by with an air of supreme disdain called back my old interest and my old desire. I felt, for the moment, very young again and capable of romantic folly, of following a particular beauty to where her motor—a De Dion landaulet—disappeared into a courtyard with the closing of the great iron-bound doors.