Joseph Hergesheimer

“ In the large disasters that were sweeping the world, the mad confusion of injustice and revolt, of contending privilege, the serene primness of Havana, its starched formality of appearance, offered a priceless quietude. It was, at once, static and mobile, a place of countless moods that merged at the turning of a corner, the shifting of a glance from La Punta to the circular bandstand at the foot of the Prado. Never pedantic, it was a city more for the emotions than the intellect; intellect, in its astigmatic conceit, had largely overlooked Havana; and Havana had missed little enough. ”

“ The negroes were infinitely happier in Havana, where the heat, the palms, were their own; and I was surprised that they didn't desert the United States in a body for a suaver spirit in the air and man. Cuba, to a large measure, with what final result I wasn't concerned, had absorbed them in the manner that Spain had absorbed the Moors. Havana made some denial of this, and prided itself, with entire justice where it was true, on unmixed Castilian blood; but the other was perceptible in the gait, the very whiteness, of Cuba's principal city—the whitest walls on earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The lower hall, the patio and dining-room on the left, were brilliant with life, the wing-like flutter of fans; and it would be necessary, I saw, to have my cocktail in the patio; but before that, following a purely instinctive course, I walked out to the paseo in front of the hotel. The white buildings beyond the dark foliage of the Parque were coruscant with electric signs, and, their utilitarian purpose masked in an unfamiliar language, they shared with the alabaster of the façades, the high fronds of the royal palms and the monument to Marti, in the tropical, the classic, romanticism. ”

“ I had already said that Havana was a city without history, which was true in the cumulative, inter-human meaning of that term. But it had, within its limits, on its island like a flower in air, an amazing and absorbing past. In the beginning, where Spain was concerned, Cuba, a fabulous land, had promised fabulous gold; but the empires of the Aztecs and Peru, incalculably richer, and the fatal dream of eternal youth in Florida, had robbed it of royal interest, of men, food, and ships. ”

“ Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba, gazing peacefully into the dim expensive space of a room in the Hotel Inglaterra, congratulating myself on the loss, the positive lapse, of what was called men's most valuable possession.
No better place for the trying of my sincerity than Havana existed; no other city in the world could so perfectly create the illusion of complete irresponsibility, of happiness followed for its own sake, as an end, or as the means of forgetfulness. ”

“ I had no doubt that a piano had been played for a brief explanatory dancing, the trial of new steps neither French nor Spanish, but American. Some of them, I knew, had been at school in New York—probably Miss Spence's, where balconies were not cultivated—and I wondered what they thought about the Havana to which they had returned. Well, if the Cuban men, the fathers and suitors and husbands, preferred to keep the historic architecture of their society, of their climate, a convent of some Sacred Heart would be wiser than a celebrated American finishing school. ”

“ 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 sun, that I had seen rising on the undiscovered hills of Cuba, was sinking behind the apprehended city; it touched the caryatids of the Gallego Club and enveloped, in a diminished gold like a fine suffusion of precious dust, the circular avenue, the royal palms, the flambeau trees and Indian laurels, of the plaza. The whiteness of the buildings, practically unbroken, everywhere took on the tone of every moment: now they were faintly aureate, as though they had been lightly touched by a gilder's brush ”

“ But, outside of all that, the other Havana, the mid-Victorian Pompeii, a city that none could have predicted or told me of, offered the incentive of its particular and rare charm. In the Parque Maceo, on the sea wall, my imagination stirred with the first beginnings of a story: it would take place in the period when the avaricious grip of Spain was loosening, a story of secret patriotism and the idealism of youth, set in marble salons, at the opera and the cafés. It would not concern itself with any love except the fidelity between two men, a story of friendship. ”

“ No one, I thought excitedly, had ever rightly appreciated Havana; it required a very involved understanding, a feeling not entirely admirable. No, it wasn't Hellenic, not what might be called in the first manner; it hadn't the simplicity of great spirit, a true epoch; Havana was artificial, exotic: Spain touched everywhere by the tropics, the tropics—without a tradition—built into a semblance of the baroque. ”

“ No, nothing so powerful as an obsession had overtaken me approaching Havana; I was not, in actuality, an adventurer, but only a seeker for charm, for memories, to carry back to the low window to which I had already referred. The charm of Havana was its strangeness, the vividness of its sudden impression on me, the temporary freedom, grace, it offered. It was characteristic of freedom, too, that, in the end, it became slavery; while slavery had, at times, extraordinarily the appearance of freedom. ”

“ Its history had flashed through my mind with the turn of a wheel, its duration seeming no more than the opening and shutting of a hand; but now I had an impression not of the transient, not of walls and names and voices, but of qualities impersonal and permanent, of something which, while individual men died, resisted death. It had existence, that was, as long as humanity drew a continuous thread of memory through time. Havana had, outwardly, changed from its first huddle of bohios and fortified tower ”

“ 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. ”

“ I was so entirely captivated by the Hotel Inglaterra that, for the rest of the day, I was indifferent to whatever might be waiting outside. The deep entrance with its reflected planes of subdued light and servants in cool linen; the patio with water, its white arches on iridescent tiles; the dining-room laid in marble, panelled with the arms of Pontius Pilate, the bronze lustre of the tiling and the long windows on the Parque exactly as I had anticipated, together created the happy effect of a bizarre domain. ”

“ A woman in a hoop skirt was an absurdity; black walnut furniture carved and gilded beyond recognition, nonsense. Yet they had my warm attachment. Havana claimed me for its own—a city where I could sit at tables in the open and gaze at parterres of flowers and palms and statues and fountains, where, in the evening, a band played the light arias of La Belle Hélène. ”

“ The romantic figment, like a confection of spun sugar with a sprig of artificial orange blossoms, had been discarded; the beauty of love, it had been discovered, wasn't the possession of a particular heart, but the tenderness, the pity, that came from the realization of its inescapable loss. No man could love a woman, no woman could love a man, who was to live forever; a thousand years would be an insuperable burden. The higher a cultivation, a delight, reached, the more tragic was its breaking by death ”

“ For Havana a woman was, in principle, a flower with delicate petals easily scattered, a perfume not to be rudely, indiscriminately, spent; a rose, it was the implication, had its moment, its perfection of eager flushed loveliness, during which what man would not reach out his hand? After that ... but the seed pods were carefully, jealously, tended. And here, in addition to so much else, was another shared attitude drawing me toward Havana—an enormous preference for women who had the courage of their emotions over those completely circumspect except in situations morally and financially solid. ”

“ I had been, in a farther development of this, tacitly left to my own devices and thoughts, as if there were a general perception of my remoteness from the affair in hand. I was suffered to come and go without notice; no one, much, spoke to me; even those not unaware of the possibility of a book, of San Cristóbal de la Habana, in which their city would find praise, were hardly stirred to interest. The moment to go to Havana was youth, the moment for masked balls and infidelity and champagne: its potency for me lay in its investment of memories; I regarded it as a spectacle set in the tropics. ”

“ Above everything, then, I was satisfied with the Havana I knew. From the standpoint of actuality my comprehension was limited—I was familiar with only a certain narrow part of the city, for it was my habit to go back to what I had found rather than discover the new—perhaps ten streets and a handful of houses, parks, and cafés. Too much to get into a score of books. What I had lost, I thought further—if, indeed, I had ever possessed it—was a warm personal contact such as I should have had dancing with a lovely girl. ”

“ There were no motors then, but volantes and the modern quintrins, with two horses, one outside the shafts, and a riding calesero in vermilion and gold lace; and, latest of all, as new as possible, the victorias.
Neither, then, was the Prado paved, but the trees were infinitely finer—five rows there were in fifty-seven—when the clamor of the city was, in great part, peals of bells. This was a familiar process with me, to leave the present for the past in a mood of irrational regret. But never for the heroic, the real past; the years I chose to imagine lay hardly behind the horizon ”

“ Once Cuba, regarded as the shore of India, had been the center of the West, and Florida no more than a chimera: how ironic such errors and reversals were! Now it was Juana that was legendary, and Florida resembled the significant hooked finger of an imponderable power. The day slid rapidly into water that had lost its blueness for expanses of chalky shallow green, and the flat roofs of Key West and masoned arches became slowly visible across the sea, and a stir of departure filled the decks. ”

“ Climate was greater than man, and the first Cubeños, dead in the mines of Cobre, were being revenged for the usurpation of their happiness and land; the negroes of the slave trade, too, were repaying their chains to the last link of misery. But these counter influences were not perceptible yet in the patios, just as the French Revolution had still to scatter the polite pastorals only to survive in the canvases of Boucher and Watteau.
It was, in Havana as well as Seville, the farewell of true formality, for after that it became only a form. ”