“Don’t get riled up,” Clemens told me consolingly. “I had thought the fellow’s words might have made you happy — I did not know what he’d say.” Then: “Anyway, I’ve made inquiries at the harbor: There’s a steamer leaving for Matanzas at ten tomorrow night.”
Finding Mr. Stanley, at Last
NOW, IF YOU LOOK at a map of Cuba, you will see that it is an elongated country, and in square miles the approximate size of the state of Pennsylvania. Just south of the Tropic of Cancer, it is shaped somewhat like a crocodile, its snout dipping down to the far southeast and its coiling tail, in the west, bounded to the south by the Caribbean Sea and to the north by the Gulf of Mexico, that end comprising the provinces of Pinar del Río, Havana, and Matanzas. The coastlines to the north are, at any rate, indented with numerous coves and inlets and small bays, the largest ones being those at Havana, Matanzas, and, farther east, toward the torso, the Bay of Cárdenas, beyond which that scaly tract is topped with countless islands of various sizes. And while looking at the northern coast, you will see that although the distance between Havana and the city of Matanzas is not very great, few places of consequence dot that verdant passage. But when one stands on the deck of a small steamer coursing through such waters at night — as Clemens and I did once we left Havana’s harbor, where ship after ship, including many a man-of-war, was anchored densely and in every direction around us — the very nature of the sea and the life within it seems to be of a more or less magical nature. For in our steamship’s wake, numerous phosphorescent eels and translucent medusas seemed to follow, something one would never see on the Mississippi (or in the Congo); and the sight of such things, which left a flickering silver trail behind us continually, had, along with the brilliant moonlight triangulating on the rolling sea, a rhapsodic effect upon Clemens, who, having caught the sailor’s madness, wanted to remain on deck for a large part of that brief voyage. (It was only of five hours’ duration.)
“Think of the pirates, Henry, who marauded in these very waters and lay waiting in hidden coves — what glorious times they must have had, plundering ships of the Spanish Main! Brings to mind my boyish days in Hannibal, Missouri, when I read of such tales — Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, pirates all. Back then, my best friend, a fellow named Tom Blankenship, and I pretended we were pirates in the woods, and we prowled about caves in search of imaginary treasures. Could be a rusted can or a few nails or some beer bottles that we’d dig up, but they all sparkled like jewels. Our pirates’ headquarters was a rotted shack on a little island, where we would plot, as only boys can, pranks to pull on our friends. We made raids on chicken coops; we attacked trees; we pushed each other around on wheelbarrows; we hoisted wooden swords as though they were cutlasses. Friends, and sometimes a slave, became our captives, and we held them for ransoms of rabbits’ feet and useless bottle caps, or sometimes for berries and a handful of walnuts, but that didn’t matter; poor as we were — and we didn’t know that we were poor, anyway — we were the richest buccaneers in the world. What times I had, Henry, such days being quiet and lazy and each somehow more glorious than the last.” Then: “It’s a pity that such Edens have to pass, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I allowed, wondering what it would have been like to have experienced so happy a boyhood.
SETTLING INTO OUR BERTHS SOMETIME past midnight, we hadn’t bothered to change our clothes, for the voyage was brief enough, the ship coming into Matanzas harbor and dropping anchor about three that morning. As we had in Havana, we waited for smaller craft to transport us to shore, then groggily paid the fees, some two reales each — a reale was equivalent to six and a half cents, the price of an aguardiente. When we landed, in the bright moonlight, we were taken to a waterside inn near the quay.
The next morning we were awakened by a burning heat that made the prospect of sightseeing, which Clemens was always intent upon, a dispiriting possibility. Still, after breakfast, as we had some hours to kill before catching the only train to Limonar, at two-thirty, we left the inn for the center of the city, which, without the high temperature, would have been a quite pleasant place, as it was quieter and less hectic than Havana, with no beggars, lepers, drunken sailors, and few soldiers about; its citizens, in general, had about them a less debauched character; the planters we saw — for this was that province’s commercial center, sugar and tobacco flowing into it from the interior — were of a more elegant and unhurried nature and seemed healthier for it. They were usually clad in white linen suits (as opposed to the French-style dark suits of the serious businessmen of Havana) and wore broad felt hats, boots, and spurs, most of them riding through town on horses. I noticed they were an unusually handsome lot—“tropical Apollos,” Clemens called them — their skin sun-bronzed, their bodies strong and sinewy, their manner serene.
And the town was beautifuclass="underline" Many of its houses seemed ancient, a result, I think, of the play of the sea upon the porous nature of the stones used in their building. As we traipsed about, without any idea of where we were going, Clemens delighted in the facts of his guidebook.
“Says here that the word matanzas means ‘slaughter’ in Spanish. Here, it says, is the site where the local Indians slaughtered a party of conquistadores long ago. Also, it says that the name commemorates a, quote, ‘sanguinary encounter between the Moors and Christians in Castile, Spain, centuries before, at a battleground called El Campo de Matanzas, just at the time when Columbus was about to embark for his American adventure’—unquote.”
Despite the blinding whiteness of the day, we were charmed by our surroundings, as the city had a quaint and unspoiled antiquity about it: Mules pulling high-wheeled carts plied its cobblestone streets; Spanish ceramic tiles, instead of street signs, were embedded into walls to mark a location; citizens moved quietly along. We came across a bullfighting arena, and the public buildings we saw were of a neoclassical architecture, with Doric columns adorning their facades: “Hence,” Clemens told me, “it’s also known as the Cuban Athens.”
From the distant terraces of wooded hills that rose behind Matanzas two small rivers flowed, and these divided the city into three or so sectors, each joined by a fine stone bridge: I had never been to Venice, but as we traversed such spaces, that is what came to mind. Indeed, more so than we had in Havana, we seemed in a foreign place.
Thirsty and overheated, and after taking in what we could of the city of Matanzas in so brief a time, we rode a carriage into the district south of the Río San Juan to the rail station: I should mention that east beyond Matanzas, railroads were practically nonexistent, only some fifteen hundred miles of American-style gauge having been put down, during the 1850s, to serve as transport for the most productive and fertile regions around Havana, mainly the large sugar plantations. These trains plied a route along a sparsely populated region, apparently of great beauty: Limonar itself was in the heart of the countryside to the southeast, some thirty miles away over the highlands from Matanzas. The train, to our reassurance, was of American manufacture, and the siding of our second-class car had markings that said it had been built by Eaton, Gilbert & Co., of Troy, New York — a long way, to be sure, from the remoteness of that place. Shortly, taking our seats among a handful of passengers, we left Matanzas.