On all street corners the Dominican flag is flying, and a marvelous unwanted animation has possession of the people. Bands are playing; horns are being blown; halls are being festooned with flowers. Santiago begins to look a gay resort. Toledo in Spain has no cinema, but Santiago has two, with biseminal releases from New York and a fitting fade away for "Blood and Sin." Santiago has its shady and pleasant drinking saloons and "Eden" with its annex.
The male guests at night, wearing evening dress, or at least black coats and white ties, all look very dapper. The grown women look stupendous. Imagine them in strawberry pink, three times as stout as a stout woman, and with loose girdles about imaginary waists. But the young women, on the contrary, are slight, dainty, with latticed sleeves and jeweled bird combs in their hair.
They will dance till they drop, no matter what the heat. It is oppressive enough at eight, but the ball lasts till four in the morning, beginning very quietly with waltzes and ending with sex dances. At midnight the town orchestra gives way to a Cuban band which beats a tom-tom for hours. In comes the drum like a storm and then subsides, or it mounts upon the music like some big-cheeked black man getting upon an elephant in front of an army, while on each side of him are pagan heralds blowing dissonances on horns.
Next day after this orgy the faces of the women are a wreck, which no powder or cosmetic will disguise. Yet one of them told me that she belonged to a party club of thirty families where they took it in turn to invite all the others. "At my house I have a hundred and fifty guests, all day, all night," said she to me.
The fiesta, as in other Spanish countries, is a sort of national institution.
4
I was not fortunate enough to be present at a fête on the French part of the island—the Republic of Haiti—but I obtained the impression that the Haitians are much wilder than the Dominicans. The Negroes do not readily identify their needs, they are more ebullient, more pious, and I should say more haunted by a prehistoric past than are the Spaniards.
Nothing is more serene, more utterly sweet, than Mass as sung in the great Cathedral at Port au Prince. But the scene outside the Cathedral for a square mile is primitive in the extreme. It is like the low suburbs of Nizhni Novgorod in Fair time, massed together and increased.
Port au Prince is built widely on a sun-bathed strand, and looks more like a capital city than Santo Domingo. A few khaki-clad Americans meet the eye, but the black population is too striking for one to consider Americans long. It seems as if the peasantry swarms into the city every day to market their produce. And what a peasantry! It would be impossible to match them. They seem to have all the salient characteristics of the southern French and of the Africans also. Their old-world, alert, shrewd, rough-hewn faces, their wit and mirth, their clamorous noisy French patois, their gay cottons and classical faces, the frankly exposed bare breasts of the women, all these tell of a people of force.
Unfortunately, owing to the calling of "dry" American ships, there is a good deal of vice. Champagne is brought to the quay, and the thirsty, indiscriminate passengers and crew knock the tops off the bottles and pour it down their throats like lemonade. The concomitants of drunkenness are all at hand. Possibly in no port in the world will a man, will any man, receive such attentions from women, be he even a somber-visaged missionary. The black girls swarm about you and fight for you.