Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “Our problem here,” said Mr. Davis that day, “is not the production itself. Aside from the machinery, the slaves comprise our greatest expense. But they are good and hard workers—we try not to use force against them. Isn’t that so, Mr. Stanley? In general, we have found that, while this is not a paradise for them, they have it better here than they would in many other plantations; certainly better than what I have seen in your American South.

  “Now, as you two have come here through that wood, you can well imagine that our biggest problem is transport, for it is not an accommodating route. For some time now we have been attempting to build a new road through the woods between here and the train station at Limonar; a road we hope to get under way with the help of monies and slaves from other plantations, as such a road would benefit us all.” Then, to Mr. Stanley, he said, “Since we are planning to visit with a plantation owner tomorrow morning to discuss the matter, perhaps these lads would like to join us.”

  “Why not?” said Mr. Stanley.

  SINCE OUR DAYS HAD BEEN largely uneventful, we welcomed the diversion, but oddly, as Clemens and I retired to our rooms that night, I was overcome by a strange misgiving about it. Where such impressions or manifestations of dread come from, I do not know, but as I attempted, somewhat restlessly, to fathom the source of my intuition, I became convinced that Mr. Stanley should not make that journey. Such was my alarm that I could not sleep, and in an agitated state I went to Clemens’s room, knocking fiercely on his door. Fortunately the strong smell of tobacco smoke met my nostrils, for he, too, had remained awake and had been restless, but for other reasons, I suppose. “What is it, Henry?” he asked, and in that moment I poured my apprehensions out.

  While sympathetic to my fears, he remained cautious: “Come, now,” he told me. “As you know, I once had a dream about my brother that came true. But that was a mere coincidence: a coincidence that I have never been happy about, but a coincidence all the same. No doubt you are just feeling anxious about your father.”

  Shortly I went back to my room, but I was again unable to sleep. Quietly I made my way out from one hall into another, my path lit by a candle, and, coming to my father’s chamber door, I knocked. And when I heard no response, I knocked again.

  My father, Mr. Stanley, a grave expression upon his face, opened the door.

  “What on earth can you want at this late hour?”

  “Father, do not make that journey tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “You will be in danger. Do not question me—I know it to be true.”

  He sighed. “It is a late hour; you have been dreaming; and perhaps you are somewhat out of sorts.” Then: “If it is the business with the adoption, rest assured, my boy, that I will attend to it.” And he closed the door.

  That night, when I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of many wishful things. I saw that I lived in a magnificent house surrounded by a garden, and I had a wife to love me, and three children. I saw Mr. Stanley coming to visit us, and with his enormous frame settled down upon a chair, jostling an infant on his lap; but then that soon turned to air, and I awoke early that morning, hearing the plantation bells summoning the day.

  AFTER BREAKFAST, CLEMENS, MR. DAVIS, Mr. Stanley, and I saddled up and rode out to the edge of the fields, about a mile from the house. For part of the way, as I remember, Clemens—or Sam, as he preferred to be called—had engaged my father in a discussion that veered somewhere between literature and religion, for they came, in that Cuban clime, to talk about the Bible.

  To Clemens’s inquiry “What, in your opinion, is the Bible?” my father, with his effortless genius, summarized his feelings about it in a single phrase: “The Bible is a book of allegories made to instruct man in the higher principles that should guide life.”

  “And would you consider it a true history of those times?” Clemens asked.

  “Yes—a history in the sense of reflecting general ancient events. But mainly they are attractive myths, to console men and guide them.”

  “And the word of God?”

  My father exhaled a deep breath.

  “The awareness of God, the speculations about Him, surely fired up the imaginations of the holy thinking men who accumulated such stories, all of them glorious in the Decalogue. But after so many years of study, I have come to consider it more as a literary creation than anything else.”

  “You know, Mr. Stanley,” Clemens said, “you would get lynched in some parts of the South for saying that.”

  “And for that reason,” my father said, “I was never a very good minister.”

  “Well,” said Clemens, “I was raised hearing such tales, but retold by the colored folks, in a human way. Sweet and tender do I remember their accounts.”

  “Yes,” allowed Mr. Stanley. “As much as I look down on slaves—or, to put it differently, my friend, as much as I find them simpleminded—I envy their clear and uncomplicated connection to such tales. They see them as not something that happened a few thousand years ago but as the kind of thing that could have happened yesterday, to a close relation.”

  “And Jesus? What make you of him?” Clemens asked.

  “A very holy man, I figure. A man who spoke—and speaks to this day—to the hearts of slaves. Much of his world was composed of them back then, but what his promised salvation from their hard lives—his paradise—might well be, I cannot say.”

  As we moved along that narrow trail, in a remote part of that plantation, under an arcade of high trees, whose bending foliage ensconced us in shade for much of our passage, and just as I, riding beside my father, had been looking in all directions cautiously, we heard horses. Then some hushed voices. Suddenly six mounted men astride palominos emerged from the surrounding brush, a great clopping of hooves and several gunshots accompanying them. The first I saw on his mount was a large black man with a machete by his side; the next a Cuban, I supposed, most stern and severe of expression. Three others were also Negroes, their faces covered with scars, one as fierce-looking as the next. Then a second Cuban followed from behind: He had a blood-red kerchief around his neck, and two fingers were missing from his left hand. They had converged upon us, smiling at our sudden consternation.

  As they began to surround us, Mr. Davis muttered: “Turn now—whatever you do, turn back toward the house.”

  But no sooner did we try to turn our mounts around than one of these men reeled his horse out behind us to block the road. Now, as Mr. Stanley wore a gold watch off a chain in plain sight on his vest, and as it glowed as a precious object, the horseman with three fingers came forward and, coveting this watch, slyly asked for the time of day. Suspecting his unfriendly intent, Mr. Stanley, being a foreigner, pretended that he did not understand the language. “No comprendo,” Mr. Stanley told him. But the fellow continued to circle around, and when we attempted to move on, that same Cuban leaned forward and took hold of Mr. Stanley’s bridle. And then he pulled from a holster below his saddle a machete, the variety that was most often used to chop sugarcane, and, jabbing it menacingly into Mr. Stanley’s coat, forcefully demanded his watch. At this point, Mr. Davis, who spoke Spanish well, explained that we were local landowners and that they were, in fact, trespassing upon the outer fringes of our plantation. But this made no impression on the Cuban brigand, for at this point, he became blunt and said: “Muy bien. Dame todo lo que tienen!” (“Hand over everything.”)

  With this, Mr. Davis pulled out his ivory-handled pistol and pointed its muzzle back at him. Frightened, with good reason, the man with three fingers moved off; and when Mr. Davis turned to the large Negro who had taken hold of Mr. Stanley’s horse, he, too, backed away. Then Mr. Davis said, “Come on!” And we began to gallop back toward the plantation, Clemens and I in the lead. But as it was not easy for so many horses to advance along so narrow a path, Mr. Davis, himself a superb horseman, was jostled after some seventy yards by Mr. Stanley’s horse and thrown onto the road. Having advanced forward, I looked back and saw that Mr. Stanley had stopp
ed to help him. But by then the Cubans had produced their own pistols and were charging toward us—I can remember that Clemens tried to halt his mount, but had gone some distance before he could turn around. In the meantime, my father, having helped Mr. Davis onto his horse, was about to ride off himself when some shots were fired. I responded with my own pistol, aimed at the Cuban with three fingers, but my horse, frightened by the noise, bucked, and I hit nothing. Eventually the brigands dispersed, though not before firing more shots after us. It was then, I am afraid to say, that Mr. Stanley, galloping toward us on that road, received a bullet in the side of his neck.

  All this occurred so quickly that I was hardly aware that Mr. Stanley had been wounded, until he, riding wildly and grasping his neck, began to sway from side to side. By then, the plantation slaves, hearing the shots as they worked in the fields, were waiting by the road to help us. Bleeding badly, Mr. Stanley slumped off his saddle into the arms of two slaves, and they carried him into the house, where he lay stretched out on a chair in the parlor.

  Gasping for air, and with a gurgling sound coming from his dressing-wrapped, swollen neck, Mr. Stanley seemed, in those moments, as good as dead. I could only pray for his recovery.

  After a few hours Mr. Stanley began to suffer from a high fever, and in the delirium that followed, he asked several times to see his dead wife. By then, Mr. Davis had instructed one of his overseers to head out to one of the bigger plantations to look for a doctor (and to inform the civil guard about the bandits so they might round up a posse), but at some late hour, as it seemed that Mr. Stanley would surely die without immediate medical assistance, Mr. Davis, having some knowledge of surgery, loosened the wrapping and decided that it would be best to extricate the bullet. A large black-and-blue lump had risen along the right side of Mr. Stanley’s neck, and discerning that the bullet was lodged there, Mr. Davis, pressing against that swelling and manipulating the hardness within, gradually brought the round dark pellet out, along with much blood and an ooze of pus. Dousing it with a cup of brandy, he then instructed one of his slaves to pour pitcher after pitcher of cold water over the wound until the swelling gradually subsided; then he dressed the wound again, and all of us, somewhat exhausted by the ordeal, retired to the veranda to drink.

  A CUBAN DOCTOR DID ARRIVE—two days later—and when he examined Mr. Stanley, he saw that while the wound itself was in a process of healing, an infection of a septic nature had begun to spread through his system. Blunt in his appraisal, he could only recommend rest, but he thought it not a bad idea for us to summon a priest to give him the last rites, “in the event he believes in such things.” Despite our obvious despair—I was inconsolable in those days—the doctor took legal issue with the fact that Mr. Davis had attended to the wound himself, and he threatened to report him to the authorities. At heart, even if he knew that Mr. Stanley would have surely died without Mr. Davis’s assistance, this physician, a somewhat bitter and gloomy man, argued for several hours with Mr. Davis about it, until Mr. Davis, getting the drift of the doctor’s threat, agreed to pay him a fee so substantial that it amounted to a bribe.

  And so the doctor, having made his point and profited by it, rode away.

  HERE I CAN HARDLY CAJOLE my own hand to write more of those days: I cannot say whether a recent fever has weakened my resolve or whether it is always painful to continue with the remembrance of sad things as one treads on a march of words toward a resolution. Beginnings are exhilarating; middles are comforting; but the final chapters of such memories are fearsome and resist easy summary. But here, as I squeeze out the words, is what happened:

  Because he slept through many of the hours of the day, I had made it my habit to look in on Mr. Stanley, to find if he had awakened. He was dressed in a long white shirt that reached to his ankles and was laid out in bed; his beard had been shorn, exposing his fine chin, and the scab on his neck, I could see, was the size of a silver dollar. In his company were two female slaves, one of whom stood beside his bed moving the air with a feather fan; the other attended to him with a casual familiarity that I found dismaying.

  On the fourth morning of my father’s illness, with little progress by way of his recovery to report, Clemens accompanied me into his room and witnessed a remarkable thing. For a few hours my father seemed to take a turn for the better: As when we entered, he was sitting up, and though by no means cured, he had apparently regained some strength.

  “Come close to me,” he said to me in a hoarse and low voice. “There is something I must tell you.”

  “What is it, Father?”

  “As you can see, you have journeyed far to look upon the face of a dying man.”

  “Think not of such things,” I said. “I know in my heart that you will get better, and when you do, there will be much awaiting us! And if you must stay in this place, then I will be by your side.”

  “Oh, my boy, just wanting something does not make it so: I can no more wish myself to good health than I can command the furniture to rise off the floor. But take heart: Though I am a dying man, I am not bothered by it, for I know that I will soon find the answer to many things.” Then, as if he could read my thoughts, he said: “As to more practical matters, regarding your adoption: I have promised to make you my legal heir, and I am now ready to do so. But I have no such paper, and so you, my dear young gentleman, must compose one for me to sign while I can still hold a pen.”

  This I agreed to do, but thinking it unsavory to hurry the matter, I remained by his side. Within a few hours Mr. Stanley’s condition worsened to the point where he could barely open his eyes or even move his head: His breathing had become forced, and all manner of aches overwhelmed him. But Death was merciful, for there came over Mr. Stanley’s face a change of expression. Shortly whatever anxieties and sadnesses were going through his mind departed, and with a sigh, and with his pulse slowing, he took my hand into his own and was about to say something, when all at once, he faintly smiled and closed his eyes and settled into a sleep from which he would not awaken. Later that night, as I stood by his side in misery and with a feeling of an impending and irretrievable loss, he breathed his last.

  MR. DAVIS HAD THOUGHT to arrange the transport of his body back to America, so that Mr. Stanley might be buried alongside his wife in St. Louis, but the logistics and the matter of preservation made it impossible, for there was no ice in that place, nor was there a nearby mortician to do the work; and he had thought of instructing his blacksmith to build a lead coffin, but such materials were not at hand. And so it was that on the morning of April 12, 1861, after a brief ceremony, during which Mr. Davis and I said some words, Mr. Stanley was laid to rest in a grave under a banyan tree on that plantation.

  The next day, Clemens and I began our journey back to Havana. What I had left of the late Mr. Stanley, aside from an indelible memory of his last moments, were a lock of his hair, which I had cut from his head as he had lain still in his bed, some few letters, and a watch of his that Mr. Davis had given me as a keepsake. Naturally my spirits were low, and my body was soon again racked by illness, my recurring malaria coming back to me: I was so grieved and upset that my constitution suffered for it. But hardly anyone would have noticed my state, for when we finally arrived in Havana, the city was in an uproar over the latest news brought in on ships from Florida. A few days before, on April 12, 1861, the same day that my father was buried, Fort Sumter had been bombed, beginning the armed hostilities of the Civil War. It took us another nine days before we reached New Orleans, and from there, we parted in the harbor, Clemens heading north up to St. Louis to join his family; and I, some hours afterward, setting off upriver to Cypress Bend, mainly to retrieve my possessions. But upon my arrival, like most young men from those parts, I was quickly swept up by the war fever, and, wishing to take my mind off Cuba and Mr. Stanley’s death, I decided to honor my promise to join the Dixie Grays, under the command of a certain Colonel Lyon, thereupon beginning my life as a Confederate soldier.

  I did not see my
dear friend Clemens again for six years.

  Here the manuscript ends.

  READING THE “CABINET” MANUSCRIPT over several evenings, Samuel Clemens gathered his own recollections regarding those days with Stanley, distant though they were to the seventy-one-year-old writer. Though he well understood the improvisational nature of memory, he found the latter part of Stanley’s account a mostly imaginative interpretation of what, so many years before, had transpired in Cuba. Clemens also thought his old friend had taken liberties in his portrait of his American “father.” Having read it over, with one or another of his half a dozen cats purring on his lap, at a time when his own writings seemed hopelessly beyond achieving the continuity of memoir—or, for that matter, the concentrated expression of the self required in novels—Clemens, who knew how difficult such writings were, deliberated endlessly about his response to Lady Stanley, “an aristocrat as nice as any he had ever known.”

  In the end, Clemens wrote a gentle note back:

  May 27, 1907

  21 Fifth Avenue, New York City

  Dear Dorothy—

  I must thank you for Stanley’s manuscript, and therefore thank you as well for the opportunity to comment upon it. It does, indeed, cover some terrain of my life—and opening such old doors brings to mind how much I miss your late husband—but as I would like to fill you in and can’t right now, on account of the fact that I am getting ready to leave for England next week, I would prefer to wait and discuss it with you in person when I come to London. In the meantime, as always, on behalf of myself and my daughters, I send you our love.

  Samuel

  ON TWAIN AND STANLEY MEETING AGAIN

  I’d seen Stanley’s anger before, going back to the days when I first came to England, in 1872, during the blossoming of our mutual fame. He was maltempered, indignant, and thought nothing about lashing out publicly at his detractors, who had dared to doubt, and rather viciously so, the truth of his Livingstone expedition. I had seen him conversing with persons and storming off in the middle of a sentence and muttering, “I have seen baboons smarter than you!” I had seen Stanley pacing frantically in a room, after a reception in his honor, denouncing one person after the other, to the point where I would have to say to him: “Henry, calm yourself, you’re doing your reputation harm.” I understood him in that regard, having a temper myself. And I knew him well enough to stand off on certain subjects; and I understood just how he, who had come up from nothing and made something of himself, had been mocked (our own friendship had suffered for several years when he had happened upon a false rumor that had me accusing him of being a “rancorous puppy,” a remark that was taken out of context). I sympathized with his feelings about the aristocracy, to whom he sometimes referred as the “upper asses.” And I suspected that the Africa business had left him thin-skinned, but my God, did he always remain bitter about those days.