Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “I met Mr. Stanley aboard a ship when I was a mate back in the early 1840s; the ship was not from these parts, but had sailed from England. Contrary to what Mr. Stanley may have told you, he is originally from Cheshire, not far from northern Wales. He’d come to Louisiana to make his fortune as a young man in the cotton trade, and in those days, he met his first wife, a Texas girl named Angela: as pretty a woman as one will ever lay eyes on. They opened a boardinghouse on Dorsiere Street in New Orleans—I had stayed there myself upon occasion. It was a clean place, and she was a good cook who ran the boardinghouse efficiently while Mr. Stanley went about his business as a trader. Now, upon his return from one of those trips, it was his misfortune to find the house locked up and deserted on account of the fact that his dear wife had died of the yellow fever in his absence. I think he may have made some Bible studies then—for such tragedies bring all men closer to God—but if he was a minister, it was a profession that… how shall I put it?… facilitated an intimate knowledge of many a widow and neglected wife in the counties of the South through which he’d traveled.

  “But even of these activities does a man soon tire, and so it was that Mr. Stanley returned to New Orleans to resume his life as a trader. I knew him—and his brother—well then, for we encountered each other in many a lively saloon; but as it is natural for a man to put down roots, Mr. Stanley wanted to marry again, and his intended was a young woman by the name of Frances Mellor—also English by birth, I should add. I believe it was in 1847 that they were wed, and a happier, more genteel couple one would be hard put to find. The only problem was that Mrs. Stanley was a frail sort of lady, aging quickly beyond her years, and because of some infirmities she could bear no children, and this, alas, did not please Mr. Stanley, who took to traveling far and wide, which is what first brought him and his brother, Captain Stanley, to Cuba. Now, aside from setting up some profitable business relations here, he, away from the wife, availed himself of… how shall I put it?… certain pleasure-making opportunities,” he said, winking with his one good eye. “But not to say that Mr. Stanley is not a gentleman. One could not find a better man than he in New Orleans; and, indeed, he cared enough for the wife to provide for her a small family of sorts—two young girls whom they adopted from an orphanage. They live in St. Louis. Surely you know these things.” Then: “Now, as for Mr. Stanley’s life here on this island, I’ll ask you a question: Aside from business, what would a man find for himself in this place?”

  And when I did not answer him, not knowing what to say, he pounded his fist against the table and said: “Freedom, pure and unencumbered, young man.” Then: “As much as you might want to find him, has it occurred to you that Mr. Stanley might not want to be found?”

  I had listened to his words with as much patience as I could muster, as Clemens had so kindly thought that this man would be of help to us, but looking at this Captain Bailey and knowing just how low men can sink, I paid him no heed.

  “Did you notice how he made no mention of my father’s great knowledge of books?” I mentioned to Clemens afterward. “How can a man speak of him without mentioning it, unless he does not really know him? And who was this captain to tell me that Mr. Stanley had adopted two daughters—what proof has he? I am almost admiring of the flourishes of his invention, Samuel, but I refuse to take them as anything more than that: an invention born of twisted self-amusement.”

  “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 throu
gh 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 beautiful: 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.

  As our train rose along an ascending grade into the hills, the harbor below became a pond of Mediterranean blue water, its houses cubes of dice, the land falling away beneath us in a succession of natural terraces, stately palm trees rising as far as the eye could see. And then, in the time it took Clemens to smoke six cigarillos, after our train slowly rose upon what seemed like an endless succession of curving track, the land began to flatten again, and we saw clusters of weepy, sad-looking trees with fronds that dropped to the ground and bore green melons; then countless banana trees and orange groves, neatly divided by avenues; such farms were separated from each other by miles of dense jungle, the foliage so thick and livid with bright tropical flowers that it was impossible to imagine how its birds, of bright plumage, passed through such woods. What fences or stone walls we saw were overgrown with lianas and creepers and blossoms. The air of that place was so pure and delightful that we began to doze, first Clemens, his head slumped against the window, then myself.

  Whatever else I knew, I was far away from Wales.

  We awakened when the train stopped to take on some produce at a way station in what seemed to be the middle of a sugarcane field; here, the Negroes and Chinese coolies who worked as brakemen and porters got off and, with machetes—cane knives—how well I would come to know them in Africa!—made their way among the high stalks, each cutting off a piece and stripping it of its rind to suck happily upon its pulp. The train would make four more stops along the way, each taking some twenty minutes or more, to load or unload whatever goods were coming from and going to the plantations, much as the riverboats did on the Mississippi, but here, in Cuba, there seemed to be no hurry about anything. Seeing as how some things were being unloaded, we decided to stretch our legs. Perhaps he was just tired, as we had not slept well the night before, but he had said little to me that morning, and I had feared, as I sometimes had with Mr. Stanley, that in my youthfulness I had been too enthusiastic in my gratitude for his friendship. I had made it my habit to express such sentiments to Mr. Clemens each and every day we were together. I should have remembered that he was not one for demonstrations of feeling, and I had resolved to stay mum about such declarations, though it was difficult. But as we stood there waiting, for all my intention to restrain myself, I told him: “Samuel, that I have you here makes a big difference to me. Surely you have chosen to accompany me out of concern for my safety—and if you hadn’t, who knows where I would be right now; surely not so close as I am to finding Mr. Stanley. Indeed, though you may feel some dismay at the foreignness of this place, know well that you have made me your lifelong friend.”

  Clemens considered my words and said: “Look, Henry, I don’t mind tagging along with you, and I don’t mind that things seem a little different here: And in a way I’m kind of fascinated with this country; from what I can see this is one very interesting place, and it’s beautiful. But you’ve got to promise me something. Please don’t forget that some folks—namely, myself—don’t need to be reminded of their good deeds, or friendship, for that matter. It’s just something that happens between people sometimes. You understand?”

  Funny what memories are: The steep grades of a provincial hillside, the colors of a blossom, the florid plumage of a bird—all such come back to one, even years later, in a dream of idealized perfection; but words, such as which can be recalled, shift about—some more vividly remembered than others, some completely lost. In this instance, concerning my friendship with Clemens, my approximation of what he said may not be entirely accurate to the word, but the sentiment of this and other moments, at their heart, remains true.

  IT TURNED OUT that the “town” of Limonar was just another two-building stop in service of a large nearby sugar plantation. To our relief, within half an hour of our arrival, there appeared, on an English-saddled white stallion, a majestically dressed gentleman who dismounted and entered the station house. It was the plantation owner himself, Mr. Bertrand, as I remember, a Frenchman.

  “So,” he said in impeccable English. “I take it that you are in need of assistance.”

  “Indeed we are,” said Clemens.

  Shortly we had made our introductions and explained our situation; as to our concerns, he was immediately helpful. He would rent us two horses the next day and would inquire after the location of Esperanza, apparently a mill of small import in those parts.

  “Come to my plantation for the night,” he said. “You will be better refreshed then, in the morning.”

  Later we made our way by carriage along a road of what seemed to be pulverized red brick, the color of the clay in that region, and entered into an orange grove, which was another quarter mile in length. Shortly we came out onto the grounds of the plantation proper. In the distance stood a group of white buildings. One was a barracks; the other a sugar mill, its furnace sending up great volumes of black, billowy smoke; a third was a warehouse; a fourth a stable for the oxen: Surrounding these buildings were endless acres of sugarcane—the stalks, some ten feet high, as densely packed as fields of corn—and hundreds of slaves, whether man, woman, or child, at work cutting cane or loading it onto oxen-driven carts. Other slaves, farther on, were busily feeding cane stalks into the mouth of a furnace.

  Then, too, there was a separate enclave of some three buildings, at whose center stood a fine mansion, but not in the southern style, with porticoes and columns, but in the Spanis
h style—a massive house with Moorish flourishes. And as we were each given a small room, even these were of a luxurious nature such as I had never experienced before—a canopied bed, a writing desk, a closet; even an Italianate chamber-pot holder, its shelves of marble as well.

  From my window I could see the fields, the slaves laboring into the night. A servant had come to escort me to a bathing room containing a toilet, its drainage abetted by a copper barrel whose spigot flowed with water into the convenience. We each took our turns in the bathing room, and by nine, cleaned up and refreshed, Clemens and I joined Mr. Bertrand and his wife for dinner.

  THE MEAL WAS TYPICALLY CUBAN: fried plantains, rice cooked with eggs, sweet potatoes, boiled cassava, and dishes of fowl and vegetables, all drowned in oil and salt and garlic—“Just like breakfast in Havana,” Clemens had said. These dishes we consumed with a lordly quantity of Catalan wine, popular on the island, followed by goblets of French sherry.

  “So what do you hear of the war?” Mr. Bertrand asked. “Are the rumors true?”

  “Yes, sir,” Clemens said. “I’m afraid it seems likely. When we left Louisiana, a few weeks back, the city was all up for it: For someone like myself—I am a riverboat pilot—it means having to sit the whole thing out. See, much of the Mississippi River traffic has been turned on its head. Anyway, I’d almost forgotten about it ’til you mentioned it, but even in Havana—well, sir, that’s all the Southerners talk about there.”

  “And would you fight? And for whom, Mr. Clemens?”

  “I suppose if I had to, I would, on the Southern side; I am from Missouri.”

  “And you, Mr. Stanley?”

  “It’s my intention, sir, when I leave this island, to head back to Arkansas to join up with a regiment called the Dixie Grays.”