And then she turned to Clemens and, reading the entry he had made in the guest book, declared: “A riverboat pilot! And one who dresses so elegantly! Goodness! What a romantic and courageous profession!” Then: “Rest assured, my dear friends, for as long as you are here at my hotel, you will not go wanting for anything.”
As we followed her down a corridor to a broad marble staircase leading to the upper floors, we could see that the hotel was a grand and cavernous affair. Behind a grillwork gate, along an inner hall, was a palm courtyard and fountain, and a choir of parrots chortling in an immense cage. Somewhere upstairs an opera company was rehearsing — their voices, ringing throughout the halls and echoing throughout the place, attested to its scale.
“This was once the residence of a very highly placed Spanish lord,” she told us. “Over a hundred years ago, he was poisoned by one of his sons in a dispute over a woman, and so, as is very common in these parts, his ghost dwells in this place. Now and then he is known to come around to greet the guests; but do not be alarmed. He is mainly a sad ghost, and not as vengeful or malicious as one would think.”
“And you’ve seen this gentleman yourself?” Clemens asked her.
“Oh, I have. His English is not very good — you would think it would be, after he’s spent so much time around my guests — but my Spanish is very fine, and we do communicate, though I find some of his antique words hard to understand sometimes.”
“And what do you speak about, ma’am?” Clemens inquired.
“Well”—she seemed amused at the question—“just ’cause he’s dead doesn’t mean he can’t fall in love! As my late husband has told me, there is no end of emotions on the other side. No, gentlemen, he has often confessed to me that I am the very sight that makes his spirit heart tremble with joy! He calls me his beautiful angel and regales me with sonnets. I am flattered, of course, but my one loyalty is to my late husband. As you can imagine, my Spanish lord — el Conde Miguel Asturiano is his name — is none too happy about the situation. Nevertheless, he persists.”
She led us up to our room on the third floor. The accommodations consisted of two hard beds, each with its own canopy of mosquito netting and separated from the other by a Chinese-style screen; a common sitting area, a dresser, and large closet. The airy chamber’s finest feature was a broad balcony opening out to the inner courtyard.
“Gentlemen, as you can see, you have a sink, but as the water piped in through the city is fetid, use it only for washing. Each morning you will find several pitchers of clear drinking water outside your door. It is brought in from a place about nine miles north of here called Marianao; this will cost you each ten cents a day. I would also caution you to wear slippers and to never walk barefoot on the floors, as there are, in this city, tiny mites that will bore their way into your toes and settle there with an infection. We have a fine restaurant below us, facing the street, and a billiard room next to it. Just a few doors down from us is a public bathhouse; and above, on our roof, there is a promenade from which you will see the harbor and the ocean beyond, an especially delightful view at sunset.”
Then, as she parted:
“But do avoid drinking the water. And if you see the count, do not be alarmed. Now, good day, gentlemen.”
THAT FIRST EVENING, AFTER CLEANING ourselves up, we went downstairs to the hotel restaurant, where we partook of a large meal of all kinds of freshly caught fish in a stew, consumed with a sizable quantity of claret and local staples, among them some tasty plantain fritters that were heavily doused in lemon and salt.
Soon enough, we made the acquaintance of several southern gentlemen who invited us to join them after our meal for some billiards. Because I did not know how to play, I remained content to watch Clemens, who seemed to have an endless capacity for the game. Occasionally he would sit down beside me and thusly apprise me of the personalities he encountered.
“A lot of these gentlemen,” Clemens told me, “own various and many businesses in Havana and elsewhere on the island. That old gentleman with the silver beard, Henry, is ninety years old — but he doesn’t look it, does he? He claims that his mingling with the Cuban ladies of ill repute has been an elixir of youth. He owns six hundred acres of a sugar enterprise. That gent, a retired politician named Morgan, was greatly involved, in the 1850s, in some kind of movement in the South to invade and annex the island of Cuba as a state. That gentleman runs one of the biggest banking concerns in Havana. Owns fifty thousand acres of timberland somewhere in the East. These businessmen are so many in number that there are several southern commercial associations in Havana — along with lodges and clubs and cultural groups, all distinct from the Spanish variety. Among these, I was pleased to find out, dear Henry, is a literary society situated in the mansion of a gentleman who lives in a verdant neighborhood in the heights of the city, an area known as the Cerro, where the embassies of foreign nations are located. Apparently this man has one of the largest English-language libraries on the island, one at which strangers are welcome. And I’ve eavesdropped on much talk about the presumed Southern victory in the event of a war, which they can’t see lasting much longer than a year. Once that happens, in regard to Cuba itself, it is said that the South will take upon itself what the federal government hasn’t been able to do in years past, which is to annex Cuba as a Southern state — to buy it from Spain outright.
“It seems that there are several thousand well-armed American soldiers from Southern regiments already here; troops brought in to protect Southern interests and help fight rebel insurgencies in the eastern part of the island. These fellows, I was told, are ready to declare themselves for the South should the war come.” Then, as he was pleased with himself: “I should teach you billiards, as there is much to learn over such a game.”
As he told me such stories, his words brought to mind something else that Mr. Stanley had told me about Cuba: Given Southern ownership of its greatest estates and concerns, Cuba might as well have been an extension of the South. (In fact, some months later, the Spanish-controlled government of Cuba, much under the sway of the Southern diplomatic corps there, would declare war on the North.)
But the behavior of these gentlemen struck even a youth such as I as somewhere paradoxical, for while it would seem that they should have been wary of strangers — as if Yankee spies might be afoot — they made no secret of the fact that a fleet of ships out of New Orleans and other ports along the gulf — from Brownsville, Texas, to St. Marks, Florida — was heading to Havana to fill the city’s warehouses with supplies that would, in the unlikely event of a future Southern reversal, be vital to the continuation of the war. As a merchant, hearing their boasts, I was fascinated by the difficult logistics of such a feat, and I found myself admiring the confidence and organization of such men. I need not further pursue the theme other than to say that as that evening and others like it unfolded, Clemens and I found ourselves among the converted when it came to the belief that the South would easily win the war.
AT SOME LATE HOUR WE RETIRED to the discomforts of our beds and tried to sleep. But sleep was somewhat of an impossibility, for even under the best of circumstances, both Clemens and I were prone to insomnia. As I remained awake, in speculation over Mr. Stanley, Clemens, giving up the fight, had gotten up for a smoke or two by the open window. It was his way. When, at some later hour, we finally managed to doze off, what rest we took was brief enough, for at six-thirty in the morning we were awakened by bells and cock crows, and by the loud conversation of some cleaning women mopping the dust off the marble floors outside our door and carrying on a discussion about a woman of their acquaintance named María Josefina. Hearing the clipped locutions of their Spanish, of which I had only a fledgling knowledge, and with the sun beginning to stream in through the shutters, and with a great feeling of the strangeness of that place, I finally realized that we had indeed arrived in Mr. Stanley’s Cuba.