La Habana The City Of Romance

Author : Joseph Hergesheimer
Publisher : Library of Alexandria
ISBN 13 : 1465519777
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (655 download)

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Download or read book San Cristóbal de la Habana written by Joseph Hergesheimer and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 1927-01-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THERE are certain cities, strange to the first view, nearer the heart than home. But it might be better to acknowledge that, perhaps, the word home has a wider and deeper significance than any mere geographical and family setting. Many men are alien in houses built from the traditions of their blood; the most inaccessible and obdurate parts of the earth have always been restlessly sought by individuals driven not so much by exterior pressure as by a strange necessity to inhabit a barren copper mountain, a fever coast, or follow to the end of life a river lost in a savage remoteness, hiding the secret of their unquenchable longing. Not this, precisely, happened to me, approaching Havana in the early morning, nothing so tyrannical and absolute; yet, watching the silver greenness of Cuba rising from the blue sea, I had a premonition that what I saw was of peculiar importance to me. I grew at once impatient and sharply intent on the resolving of a nebulous, and verdant mass into the details of dense slopes, slopes that showed, from the sea to their crowns, no break in a dark foliage. The sombreness of the leaves immediately marked the land from an accustomed region of bright maples—they were at once dark, glossy, and heavy, an effect I had often tried to describe, and their presence in such utter expanses filled me with pleasure. It was exactly as though the smooth lustrous hills before me had been created out of an old mysterious desire to realize them in words. Undoubtedly their effect belonged to the sea, the sky, and the hour in which they were set. The plane of the sea, ruffled by a wind like a willful and contrarily exerted force, was so blue that its color was lost in the dark intensity of tone; while the veils of space were dissolved in arcs of expanding light. The island seemed unusually solid and isolated, as complete within itself as a flower in air, and saturated with romance. That was my immediate feeling about Cuba, taking on depth across water profounder than indigo ... it was latent with the emotional distinction which so signally stirred me to write. At once, in imagination, I saw the ineffable bay of Guatanago, where buccaneers careened their ships and, in a town of pink stucco and windows with projecting wooden grilles, drank and took for figureheads the sacred images of churches painted blue. On the shore, under a canopy of silk, a woman, naked but for a twist of bishop's purple, bound her hair in gold cloth. From where she stood, in dyed shadow, a figure only less golden than the cloth, she heard the hollow ring of the caulking malls and the harsh rustle of the palms. Drawing rapidly nearer to what was evidently the entrance to the harbor of Havana I considered the possibilities of such a story, such a character: She had her existence in the seventeenth century, when Morgan marched inland to rape Camagüey—the daughter, without doubt, of a captain of the Armada de Barlevento, the Windward Fleet, and a native woman taken in violence; a shameless wench with primitive feelings enormously complicated by the heritage of Spain's civilization, a murderous, sullen, passionate jade, wholly treacherous and instinct with ferine curiosity. The master for her, I decided, must come from the Court of Charles, the London of the Cavalier Parliament, a gentleman in a gay foppery masking a steel eaten by a cruelty like a secret poison. It would be a story bright with the flames of hell and violent as a hurricane; the pages would reflect the glare of the sand scrawled with cocoanut palms, and banked with mangroves; and, at the end, the bishop's purple would be a cerecloth and the gallows chains sound in Xaymaca. But, above everything else, it would be modern in psychology and color treatment, written with that realism for which the only excuse was to provide a more exact verisimilitude for romance.