IN MY ABSENCE ERNESTINA had been involved in some mysterious accident which had left the slightest possible change in her facial appearance, and a white scar across the septum of the nose just above the curve of the upper lip. Something in her spirit had changed, too. There was a slight scar there as well, which I could only hope would soon disappear. Florence, Franco’s widow, still an occasional visitor to Gordon Street and an eager imparter of ill-tidings, was happy to suggest to me that she had been knocked down by a bus in a suicide attempt. It was significant that all reference to the small evidence of physical mishap was scrupulously avoided in the Corvaja household. I had long since been trained never to ask a potentially embarrassing question.
It was a time of some stress for the Corvajas as a whole. Eugene had gone off to the Spanish Civil War to drive an ambulance on the Republican side, which seemed doomed to defeat, and after the success of the Corvaja parents’ return to Italy something had gone wrong with their plans for further visits which might have led in the end to a permanent move back to Sicily. One night, a month or two after the trip to Rome, the doorbell had rung and Ernesto’s agent, Di Luca, who had come hot-foot from Palermo, was on the doorstep. Di Luca, with his stained eyes, his small, wistful face, and the arch-conspirator’s high-crowned black hat, was always the carrier of weighty news. He spoke in the thickest Sicilian dialect, of which I was only ever to understand a single word sangue (blood), when at the time of our first meeting he kissed my hand and mumbled a conventional formula of allegiance. All Ernesto said on this occasion, after he had left, was, ‘I have changed my plans.’ The Corvajas, too, had watched Mussolini’s badly-trained and ill-armed legions on the march again, and from conversations with such leading fascists as Count Giordano they were sure that war was coming and that Italy would be dragged in.
Ernestina’s loss of satisfaction with life was symbolized by an increasing obsession with comedy in all its forms. Like so many in those days she had made a brief incursion into psycho-analysis, been assured by the analyst that she was without creative power, and been recommended to accept life as a spectacle. Now she was more isolated than ever, because a close friendship of many years’ standing had come to an end. The friend, an Anglo-Indian girl, had moved into Gordon Street, being welcomed by the Corvajas as another daughter. Now Ernestina discovered that her friend had had a longstanding relationship, kept secret from her, with an elderly lover. It was a deception she was unable to tolerate, and although such were the rules of Sicilian hospitality that the ex-friend continued to live under her parents’ roof, the pair no longer spoke to each other.
The spring of 1939 came, and with it I made my brief incursion into the world of serious motor-racing. Between us my friend Arthur Baron and I had bought a wreck of the Bugatti in which Mervyn White had been killed in the Ulster TT. This was a Type 51 and a celebrated car, for, driving it, Earl Howe had for a short time held the Brooklands lap record of 136 m.p.h. Arthur rebuilt the car with certain improvements and we entered it at the opening meeting at Brooklands on 17 March.
The car had performed excellently in minor events throughout the 1938 season, but on the day of my Brooklands debut the weather was bad, with mist and rain, and poor visibility, and I lacked the experience to handle an extremely powerful car in these conditions. On the second lap of the mountain circuit, I skidded, struck a sand bank, and nearly went over the top of the banking — an eventuality which, as far as I know, no one ever survived. Recovering, but going too fast, I was faced by the anarchy of several cars completely out of control at the fork ahead, and when I applied the brakes I spun the car several times before stalling the engine and coming to a standstill.
We consoled ourselves with assurances of the valuable experience gained. The truck, the car and the weather had each taught us lessons. Unfortunately they were lessons from which we were destined never to profit. This was the end of car-racing for us, when it had hardly begun. Very soon Brooklands was to put on its wartime camouflage, and when it emerged it was a race track no longer. I never sat at the wheel of a Bugatti again.
Now Ernestina was seized by a desire to go to Cuba, where a friend of her Spanish schooldays had taken refuge to escape the Civil War. They exchanged excited letters, and the friend begged her to come out. I waited for this mood to pass but in vain. Ernestina read everything she could lay her hands upon about the promised land, and her obsession became steadily more acute.
She was having treatment for nervous tension. ‘Humour her,’ the doctor said knowingly. ‘If you can raise the wind, go. My uncle used to be a ship’s doctor, and he was there once. It’s a weird sort of disease-ridden hole. Probably change her mind when she sees it. Get it out of her system.’
It took some months to get together the necessary cash, then in July 1939 we were off by third-class passage to New York. All the New Yorkers were convinced that war was now inevitable, and many wore large badges of the electioneering kind, that said ‘KEEP AMERICA OUT’. So universal was this lack of enthusiasm in the United States for embroilment in European affairs that the stewards on the Grace Line boat we took down to Havana admonished us, as English, on the dangerous likely outcome of British aggression. We entered Havana harbour, and suddenly all was forgotten. This was a different planet.
A norther, lifting the sea, had thrown a great curtain of spindrift over the city’s façade, over the bay’s curve of lean houses, granite-grey, pink, coral, pistachio as their owners had painted them in the colour of whichever political party they supported. Moon-faced negroes with dislocated joints were dancing down the Malecón, in and out and around the long cannon pointed out to sea. Music from drums banged at us from all sides as our carriage rattled through the streets. An altar with a black-faced madonna rocked on the seat at the driver’s side. He took us to an apartment house of the cheaper sort, where we were asked to wash our feet before we entered. Then the lady of the house brought us sweet, tasteless fruit that stained our lips with indigo, and her son, standing by, played a flute while we ate it.
Much of the day we spent in the Central Park, watching. When we sat on a bench and kept quite still, doves no bigger than sparrows would alight on our arms, even our heads, in the search for crumbs. A bus rumbled by, every one of its passengers wearing an animal mask. An official hero of some old revolution, as a label he wore proclaimed, raised his cocked hat as he passed. A family dressed as if for a wedding escorted a manacled lunatic on a day-pass from the madhouse. Smoke spiralled everywhere from the finest of all cigars, and above us in the trees at least a thousand canaries, released to bring song to the city, twittered and chirped. Some time that afternoon I heard a sound recognizable only from American gangster films, the unmistakable heavy, slugging rattle of a Thompson sub-machine-gun. Following the crowd movement, we came upon three men in tattered clothing sprawled in their blood on a perfectly kept and weeded path. Their story was announced without excitement in the evening newspapers. There was an election on, they had agreed to sell their votes for a dollar apiece, then gone back on their bargain and demanded one twenty-five. For this, pour encourager les autres, a politician had killed them.
After this we stayed for a while with Ernestina’s friends, the Castaños, in the new Vedado suburb. They were fascists living in Santander where Ernestina had been in school, and had managed to escape from this staunchly Republican town within days of the outbreak of the war. Now, following the Nationalist victory, they were making their plans for a return. In the meanwhile they enjoyed life in Havana, and had become hangers-on at ‘The Palace’, the name by which Batista’s ornate villa was generally known. At this time Fulgencio Batista — for some years the real ruler of the country — was at the height of his popularity, the idol of the crowds. The worst severity he had so far committed was to have a magazine editor who opposed him thoroughly dosed with castor oil, and it was only in later life that he became addicted to murder and canasta. The Castaños were overjoyed to have been invited to a party at which Batista and his guests retired after dinner to listen to attacks on his character, which always greatly amused him, made by a communist radio station he never interfered with in the slightest way.
The dictator-to-be was a handsome, witty man, ready with a smile and a joke, and it did no harm to anyone to allow him to overhear a reference to his old nickname El Mulato Lindo, meaning ‘the handsome mulatto’. There was no nonsense about him. In the old days when he was a sergeant, biding his time to smash the generals, he had taken up with a washerwoman. Years later she bore him a son and then became his wife, and now Doña Elisa was still to be seen most mornings doing her shopping in Havana’s department store, Los Encantos.
On one occasion the Castaños arranged for me to be presented at ‘The Palace’, but something went wrong with the timing of the appointment. A chamberlain alerted the President-to-be to my presence, and after a while, taken by surprise, he popped his head round a door. His face was concealed by the bandages soaked in lemon juice he often wore when relaxing, in the vain hope of reducing the swarthiness of his skin. Through this covering protruded a substantial cigar. He gave a flip of the hand and slipped back out of sight, and I withdrew.
Thus life in Havana went on; a city always dressed for carnival in which the rich feasted in sedentary fashion and the poor danced and starved to music. On the first day by the purest of chance we had witnessed gross violence of the kind that was almost a national speciality. Thereafter, behind the mask of laughter, there were always small violences and tragic scenes in plenty, but soon we became inured to them — just as, by the coarsening of habit, a humane man may eventually come to tolerate the spectacle of a bullfight.
All the pessimistic predictions about the outcome of this expedition so far as Ernestina was concerned went wrong, for she did not tire of the pleasures of Havana, and showed not the slightest desire to go back to England. Suddenly, in this environment, she had developed a flair for a social life she found stimulating, and was the centre of attraction at parties given not only by Spanish expatriates, but by native patrician families, gachupines (wearers of spurs) who felt themselves a cut above Cuban colonists, most of whom had a dash of Negro blood. At such gatherings she sparkled, being a lively conversationalist, better read than anyone else in the room, and fresh with tidings from Europe, in the direction of which the eyes of all Cubans of the upper class were turned with yearning.
Suddenly we found ourselves a success, members of the Yacht and Jaimanitas Clubs, invited to country homes, and lent by somebody with a fleet of cars an enormous Cadillac in order to be able to accept such invitations.
Cuba, larger than one would suppose it to be, sprawls half across the Caribbean. Most of it remained off the beaten tourist track, and in these rural areas where the oldest inhabitants had childhood memories of the days of slavery, a strong servile whiff was still to be noticed. When we were shown the old slave-quarters of the great houses we visited, their dungeons, the fetters and the stocks, a kind of nostalgic pride was in evidence.
We stayed on a vast sugar plantation near Bayamó, and the owner, displaying his trophies, drew our attention to a case identical to those in which he kept his butterflies, containing at first what appeared to be scraps of shredded leather, pinned in position as the butterflies were. He was a man with a gentle deprecatory manner, who seemed to find life itself uncivilized, and he explained with a rueful smile that these were ears cut from the bodies of revolted slaves in the days of his great-grandfather. We went on to the veranda and looked out across the ocean of ripening cane to the great purple hump of the Sierra Maestra, lying between us and the sea. ‘You can blame it on those mountains,’ the plantation owner said. ‘They had an unsettling effect on the field labour. They used to get away and hide in the woods, and the dogs had to be sent in to ferret them out. The best dogs came from England; the problem was to get to the quarry before they ate him. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that. That’s the way it was in a slave-owning society.’
‘And were they all like your great-grandfather?’
‘Of course they weren’t. Some people wouldn’t have dreamed even of thrashing a slave, let alone killing him. If you were soft-hearted and one of your slaves needed correction you sent him down to Bayamó where there were professional floggers to handle it. The main problem was with new arrivals, before they had settled in. Some of the estate owners had them flogged once a week. They claimed it helped them to adjust. Please don’t think I feel anything but disgust for the kind of things that went on, but these are the facts.’
Now it was the quiet season, with the weeding done and the cane cutting still months ahead, and until work resumed no wages would be paid. Employers gave their workers occasional handouts. Our plantation owner, who made an issue of a kilo of bread a day per family, thought he was as generous as most. His negroes collected a certain amount of wild fruits, and were in his opinion accustomed to steal coffee beans from a neighbouring estate. They also, he said, chewed the butt-ends of cigars thrown away in the main square in Bayamó. For a moment I could not make up my mind whether this additional information was meant as a joke, but it was not.
We looked down on a yard surrounded by buildings in which the cane was crushed, and the juice treated. Here a few negroes in ragged cotton trousers were using up time, looking much as their ancestors must have looked before the emancipation in the seventies. ‘This is Africa,’ the plantation owner said. ‘You might as well go and live there and have done with it.’
A drum was thudding somewhere out of sight. ‘They’ve built themselves a cabildo — that’s a voodoo temple — on the other side of the sheds,’ the plantation owner said. ‘You probably noticed the image of Santa Barbara in my study. They sacrifice white cocks, and a goat at Christmas to her. She’s the same as Changó, their old god of war. You can buy all the stuff you need for her altar in Woolworth’s in Havana. They have just as many White customers as Blacks.’
We asked the plantation owner why this should be, and he said, ‘We made slaves of the Blacks and now it’s their turn. They’ve done something to our minds. Half my friends are in one or other of the cults. This is a very strange place to live in. Do you know what a bocor is? They live in the trunks of cotton trees. They can raise men from the dead.’
‘And do you really believe that?’ I asked.
‘You can’t deny the evidence of your own eyes,’ the plantation owner said.
When we left, the plantation owner said that there was some talk of bad weather on the way, suggesting that it might be wise to return to Havana by the Central Highway. Radio weather forecasts were extremely unreliable, he said, and to be on the safe side he sent a negro to consult the image of St John the Baptist in a local shrine, who as Ogun, African god of drunkards, was also a meteorological expert. The negro took an offering of the plantation owner’s special reserve white rum in a cough mixture bottle, returning shortly afterwards with a message of thanks from the god — or saint — and warning us that a small hurricane was on its way and might be expected to reach the north-west coast later that day. I tried to telephone Havana in the hope of getting a second opinion on this, but the lines were unaccountably busy, so we set out for Nuevitas on the north shore.
Nuevitas was famous for the huge variety and numbers of seabirds breeding on a large cay just off shore, and as an occasional bird watcher I much wanted to visit this. In about three hours we reached the town, an eighteenth-century Caribbean survival full of colour, of rickety wooden houses and wayward streets, of boatbuilding and the smell of sawn mahogany planks, of saloons with swing doors and lean horses sagging at hitching posts.
Here, there was instant confirmation that St John’s — or Changó’s — prediction had been accurate, for the population was engaged with saving their boats, which teams of mules were dragging over rollers up into the streets and as far as they could from the water. A dramatic change had come over the day, for although the sun shone brightly enough, there was something discoloured and yellowed about the light, as if this frantic activity around us, this manhandling of boats and nailing-up of shutters were being viewed through coloured screens.
We found an open space, a hillock from which we could look down through the coloured clapboard houses to the sea. It had fallen slack, but something seemed to be on the move under its polished surface as if a shoal of whales were about to surface. The sky curdled and darkened, throwing grey veils across the sun. There was not a flicker of breeze and the only sounds to be heard were the urgent tapping of hammers and shouts of the teamsters urging on their mules. Some miles out to sea a dark cloud, dense and fleshy as a negro’s hand, pressed down on the water and was now rapidly expanding, and in a far corner of the field of vision the delicate wisp of a water spout joined sea and sky.
The small town of Nuevitas stretched into a promontory pointing at the great Cay of Sabinas and within minutes a wall of water charged into it. As it struck, the cay appeared to put up a crest of white water from one end to another, and we looked up to see thousands of seabirds flying before the hurricane, like grey ash from a conflagration blown across the sky. As the shacks clustered on the headland caught the first lash of the wind, walls and thatches were snatched away. The next gust pelted us with airborne debris of all kinds, rocked the car on its springs and cracked a window. The moment had come for retreat.
The hurricane followed us for ten miles, then fell back, a clean-edged frontier of night behind the shining palms. Within the hour we were in Camagüey, where the news was that Germany had invaded Poland. By the next day, when we arrived back in Havana, England was at war.