Islands in the Stream (31 page)

He took a long sip of the drink and felt it clean and cold and fresh-tasting in his mouth. This was the worst part of the road where the street car line ran and the traffic was bumper to bumper on the level crossing of the railroad when the gates were down. Ahead now beyond the lines of stalled cars and trucks was the hill with the castle of Atares where they had shot Colonel Crittenden and the others when that expedition failed down at Bahía Honda forty years before he was born and where they had shot one hundred and twenty-two American volunteers against that hill. Beyond, the smoke blew straight across the sky from the tall chimneys of the Havana Electric Company and the highway ran on the old cobblestones under the viaduct, parallel to the upper end of the harbor where the water was as black and greasy as the pumpings from the bottoms of the tanks of an oil tanker. The gates came up and they moved again and now they were in the lee of the norther and the wooden-hulled ships of the pitiful and grotesque wartime merchant marine lay against the creosoted pilings of the wooden docks and the scum of the harbor lay along their sides blacker than the creosote of the pilings and foul as an uncleaned sewer.

He recognized various craft that he knew. One, an old barque, had been big enough for a sub to bother with and the sub had shelled her. She was loaded with timber and was coming in for a cargo of sugar, Thomas Hudson could still see where she had been hit, although she was repaired I now, and he remembered the live Chinamen and the dead Chinamen on her deck when they had come alongside her at sea. I thought you weren’t going to think about the sea today.

I have to look at it, he said to himself. Those that are on it are a damned sight better off than those that live in what we have just been riding through. This harbor that I has been fouled for three or four hundred years isn’t the I sea anyway. And this harbor isn’t bad out by the mouth. Nor even so bad over by the Casablanca side. You’ve known good nights in this harbor and you know it.

“Look at that,” he said. The chauffeur, seeing him looking, started to stop the car. But he told him to go on. “Keep going to the Embassy,” he said.

He had looked at the old couple that lived in the board and palm frond lean-to they had built against the wall that separated the railway track from a tract of ground where the electric company stored coal they unloaded from the harbor. The wall was black with coal dust from the coal that was hauled overhead on the unloader and it was less than four feet from the roadbed of the railway. The lean-to was built at a steep slant and there was barely room for two people to lie down in it. The couple who lived in it were sitting in the entrance cooking coffee in a tin can. They were Negroes, filthy, scaly with age and dirt, wearing clothing made from old sugar sacks, and they were very old. He could not see the dog.

“¿Y el perro?”
he asked the chauffeur. “Since a long time I haven’t seen him.” They had passed these people now for several years. At one time the girl, whose letters he had read last night, had exclaimed about the shame of it each time they passed the lean-to.

“Why don’t you do something about it, then?” he had asked her. “Why do you always say things are so terrible and write so well about how terrible they are and never do anything about it?”

This made the girl angry and she had stopped the car, gotten out, gone over to the lean-to and given the old woman twenty dollars and told her this was to help her find a better place to live and to buy something to eat.

“
Si, señorita
,” the old woman said. “You are very amiable.”

The next time they came by the couple were living in the same place and they waved happily. They had bought a dog. It was a white dog too, small and curly, probably not bred originally, Thomas Hudson thought, for the coal dust trade.

“What do you think has become of the dog?” Thomas Hudson asked the chauffeur.

“It probably died. They have nothing to eat.”

“We must get them another dog,” Thomas Hudson said.

Past the lean-to, which was now well behind them, they passed on the left the mud colored plastered walls of the headquarters of the general staff of the Cuban army. A Cuban soldier with some white blood stood indolently but proudly in his khakis faded from his wife’s washings, his campaign hat much neater than General Stillwell’s, his Springfield at the most comfortable angle across the ill-covered bones of his shoulder. He looked at the car absently. Thomas Hudson could see he was cold in the norther. I suppose he could warm up by walking his post, Thomas Hudson thought. But if he stays in that exact position and does not waste any energy the sun should be on him soon and that will warm him. He must not have been in the army very long to be so thin, he thought. By spring, if we still come by here in the spring, I probably will not recognize him. That Springfield must be awfully heavy for him. It is a shame he cannot stand guard with a light plastic gun the way bullfighters now use a wooden sword in their work with the
muleta
so their wrists will not tire.

“What about the division that General Benitez was going to lead into battle in Europe?” he asked the chauffeur. “Has that division left yet?”

“
Todavía no
,” the chauffeur said. “Not yet. But the general is practicing learning to ride a motorcycle. He practices early in the morning along the Malecon.”

“It must be a motorized division then,” Thomas Hudson said. “What are those packages that the soldiers and officers are carrying as they come out of the Estado Mayor?”

“Rice,” the chauffeur said. “There was a cargo of rice came in.”

“Is it difficult to get now?”

“Impossible. It’s in the clouds.”

“Do you eat badly now?”

“Very badly.”

“Why? You eat at the house. I pay for everything, no matter how far the price goes up.”

“I mean when I eat at home.”

“When do you eat at home?”

“Sundays.”

“I’ll have to buy you a dog,” Thomas Hudson said.

“We have a dog,” the chauffeur said. “A really beautiful and intelligent dog. He loves me more than anything in the world. I cannot move a foot that he does not want to come with me. But, Mr. Hudson, you cannot realize nor appreciate, you who have everything, what this war means in suffering to the people of Cuba.”

“There must be much hunger.”

“You cannot realize it.”

No, I can’t, Thomas Hudson thought. I can’t realize it at all. I can’t realize why there should ever be any hunger in this country ever. And you, you son of a bitch for the way you look after the motors of cars, you ought to be shot, not fed. I would shoot you with the greatest of pleasure. But he said, “I will see what I can do about getting you some rice for your house.”

“Thank you very much. You cannot conceive of how hard life is now for us Cubans.”

“It must be really bad,” Thomas Hudson said. “It is a shame I cannot take you to sea for a rest and a vacation.”

“It must be very difficult at sea, too.”

“I believe it is,” Thomas Hudson said. “Sometimes, even on a day such as today, I believe it is.”

“We all have our crosses to bear.”

“I would like to take my cross and stick it up the
culo
of a lot of people I know.”

“It is necessary to take things with calm and patience, Mr. Hudson.”

“
Muchas gracias
,” said Thomas Hudson.

They had turned into San Isidro street below the main railway station and opposite the entrance to the old P. and O. docks where the ships from Miami and Key West used to dock and where the Pan American airways had its terminal when they were still flying the old clippers. It was abandoned now that the P. and O. boats had been taken over by the Navy and Pan American was flying DC-2’s and DC-3’s to the Rancho Boyeros airport and the Coast Guard and the Cuban navy had their sub chasers tied up where the cuppers used to land.

Thomas Hudson remembered this part of Havana best from the old days. The part that he loved now had then been just the road to Matanzas; an ugly stretch of town, the castle of Atares, a suburb whose name he did not know, and then a brick road with towns strung along it. You sped through them so that you did not remember one from another. Then he had known every bar and dive around this part of town and San Isidro had been the great whorehouse street of the waterfront. It was dead now, with not a house functioning on it, and had been dead ever since they closed it and shipped all the whores back to Europe. That great shipment had been the reverse of how Villefranche used to be when the American ships on the Mediterranean station would leave and all the girls would be waving. When the French ship left Havana with the girls aboard, all the waterfront was crowded and it was not only men that were saying goodbye, waving from the shore, the docks, and the sea wall of the harbor. There were girls in the chartered launches and the bum-boats that circled the ship and ran alongside her as she went out the channel. It was very sad, he remembered, although many people thought it was very funny. Why whores should be funny he had never understood. The shipment was supposed to be very comic, though. But many people were sad after the ship had gone and San Isidro street had never recovered. The name still moved him, he thought, although it was a dull enough street now and you hardly ever saw a white man or woman on it except for truck drivers and delivery cart pushers. There were gay streets in Havana where only Negroes lived and there were some very tough streets and tough quarters, such as Jesús y María, which was just a short distance away. But this part of town was just as sad as it had been ever since the whores had gone.

Now the car had come out onto the waterfront itself where the ferry that ran across to Regla docked and where the coastwise sailing ships tied up. The harbor was brown and rough, but the sea that was running did not make whitecaps. The water was too brown. But it was fresh and clear brown-looking after the black foulness of the inner parts of the bay. Looking across it, he saw the calm of the bay that lay in the lee of the hills above Casablanca where the fishing smacks were anchored, where the gray gunboats of the Cuban navy lay, and where he knew his own ship was anchored, although he could not see her from here. Across the bay he saw the ancient yellow church and the sprawl of the houses of Regla, pink, green, and yellow houses, and the storage tanks and the refinery chimneys of Belot and behind them the gray hills toward Cojímar.

“Do you see the ship?” the chauffeur asked.

“Not from here.”

Here they were to the windward of the smoking chimneys of the Electric Company and the morning was as bright and clean and the air as clear and new-washed as on the hills of the farm. Everyone moving about the docks looked cold in the norther.

“Let’s go to the Floridita first,” Thomas Hudson said to the chauffeur.

“We are only four blocks from the Embassy here.”

“Yes. But I said I wished to go to the Floridita first.”

“As you wish.”

They rode straight up into town and were out of the wind and, passing the warehouses and stores, Thomas Hudson smelled the odor of stored flour in sacks and flour dust, the smell of newly opened packing cases, the smell of roasting coffee that was a stronger sensation than a drink in the morning, and the lovely smell of the tobacco that came strongest just before the car turned to the right toward the Floridita. This was one of the streets he loved but he did not like to walk along it in daylight because the sidewalks were too narrow and there was too much traffic and at night when there was no traffic they were not roasting the coffee and the windows of the storehouses were closed so you could not smell the tobacco.

“It is closed,” the chauffeur said. The iron shutters were still down on both sides of the café.

“I thought it would be. Go on down Obispo now to the Embassy.”

This was the street he had walked down a thousand times in the daytime and in the night. He did not like to ride down it because it was over so quickly but he could not justify himself delaying in reporting any longer and he drank the last of his drink and looked at the cars ahead, the people on the sidewalk, and the crossing traffic on the north and south streets, and saved the street for later when he could walk it. The car stopped in front of the Embassy and Consulate building and he went in.

Inside you were supposed to fill out your name and address and the object of your visit at a table where a sad clerk with plucked eyebrows and a moustache across the extreme lower part of his upper lip looked up and pushed the paper toward him. He did not look at it and went into the elevator. The clerk shrugged his shoulders and smoothed his eyebrows. Perhaps he had emphasized them a little too much. Still they were cleaner and neater that way than wooly and bushy and they did go with his moustache. He had, he believed, the narrowest moustache it was possible to achieve and still have a moustache. Not even Errol Flynn had a narrower one, not even Pincho Gutiérrez, not even Jorge Negrete. Still that son of a bitch Hudson had no right to walk in like that and ignore him.

“What sort of
maricones
have you on the door now?” Thomas Hudson asked the elevator operator.

“That’s not a
maricón
. That’s nothing.”

“How’s everything here?”

“Good. Fine. The same as always.”

He got off at the fourth floor and walked down the hall. He went in the middle door of the three and asked the Marine warrant officer at the desk if the Colonel was in.

“He flew down to Guantánamo this morning.”

“When will he be back?”

“He said he might go to Haiti.”

“Is there anything for me?”

“Nothing with me.”

“Did he leave any message for me?”

“He said to tell you to stick around.”

“How was he feeling?”

“Awful.”

“How did he look?”

“Terrible.”

“Was he plugged at me?”

“I don’t think so. He just said to tell you to stick around.”

“Is there anything I ought to know?”

“I don’t know. Is there?”

“Cut it out.”

“Okay. I suppose you had it pretty dusty. But you weren’t working for him in this office. You get out to sea. I don’t give a goddam—”