Winter in the West Indies

A Series of Not Altogether Rhapsodic Impressions of the Caribbean's Necklace of Islands

PAUL MORAND

YOU come home, your pockets bulging with illustrated catalogues, attractive pamphlets, and photographs that set you to dreaming. "Howling pirates on the magic seas . . . three centuries of English and Spanish tradition . . . roads of white . . . corals . . . riotous colouring . . . sapphire harbours." . . . You light your pipe. ... In New York, night is falling.... What! would you be mad enough to leave these blessed regions of the North, where heat is regulated in keeping with a man's desires, where the White Rock is so fresh, where the negroes are trim and obliging, where all the lovely women of your acquaintanceship are at the other end of the telephone? You continue your reading: "oranges, pineapples, sapadillas, guavas, mangoes, cocoanuts, custard-apples . . ." How, pineapples on draught, mangoes from the wood? You go to the window; all the lights of Brooklyn are twinkling. . . . Beyond Chinatown lie the steamship companies, the beautiful fruit boats, all white. ... A modern Columbus, you can be in the tropics within five days. You resist no longer; you engage your cabin. . . .

Pineapples, guavas, mangoes. ... I do not want to scorn the gifts of nature and be the one pessimist of America, but I must say that I know of nothing more monotonous than the tropical fruits. "We have no bananas" is the North's cry of delight at being happily emancipated from this tasteless and farinaceous food. In the tropics there are nothing but banana plants and coco palms, then more banana plants and coco palms. The pineapples are as hard as wood, the oranges lack juice, and the mangoes are never in season.

THERE is constant talk of Mother Nature's luxuriant imagination. But what should we say of the imagination of man who has enriched his winters with such inventions as foie gras, glazed chestnuts, and Pommery? What are the tropical flowers? There is talk of orchids, but you never see them. The hibiscus, those legions d'honneur of the forest, the shrub buginvillaea: and then? The rose and the pink come from Asia? Sorry pinks, roses like brambles. On the other hand think what magnificent artificial creations the English gardeners and the Dutch horticulturists have given us. Look what has been done with the rose—and what enormous carnations, unrecognizable in their beauty, have been produced. Similarly with the animals. Look at them in the tropics: scraggly donkeys, mistreated by the natives; a cloud of famished vultures; never another bird in sight except in the malaria-ridden country of the Amazon; hairless dogs; a rachitic live-stock. As to the partridges, the sapajous, and the opossums, it is useless to kill them, since they are inedible. Compare all these to the marvellous products of the North; the blooded dogs with their coating of fur, the sleek spirited horses, the ingeniously cross-bred live-stock, this endless variety and high physical development due to the intelligence of the white race; and tell me where the richness and the luxuriance are to be found? The seas are warm down there, you say? What does that matter: they are dangerous, because of the sharks. The nights are beautiful? But no one can enjoy them, because of the mosquitoes. And you expect me to be optimistic?

All the islands resemble one another. Banana plants, coco palms. Short story writers must be wary: there are no lions in the Antilles, nor tiger cats, nor even serpents. These are inoffensive tropics, sterilised, with no element of danger except the volcanic eruptions. The Antilles are the peaks of volcanoes, or coral reefs. Moreover, why shouldn't the earth tremble somewhat? Are not boats, horses, and the stock exchange unsteady —as are many places which people generally frequent? The tropical cocktails are good, but they too lack variety. Nothing differs but the proportions: it is always rum, gin, and lime.

THE two most beautiful natural prospects in the West Indies are the patio of the Hotel Sevilla in Havana at the cocktail hour, and the bath in the sea-water pool at Kingston, Jamaica. Yet on reflection, these sites are found to owe their beauty to the magnificent American girls which one sees there in the full splendour of their animal spirits,—American girls, those gifts bestowed upon the world by the gods of the twentieth century. They form a kind of mystic union between sun and snow, South and North. I have no exceptional admiration for Havana, the American Monte Carlo, where all the bottles of alcohol are shaped like flasks. This island, which produces more sugar than all the diabetics in the world, makes its cocktails too sweet; and the skyscrapers there are too often sun-scrapers. The Latins are wrong in carrying over so many social conventions into their sports. I even saw a Yacht Club without boats; and its enormous automobiles, with open cut-outs and coloured lights like vessels, could hardly serve in this roadless country but to encircle the music pavilion in the evening. But Santiago is an exotic city, and the girls there are beautiful and glowing. The January bathing at Jamaica, two days farther down, offers a divine spectacle, although there too the North meets the expenses. At Myrtlebank or Bournemouth, the world's happiest splash in pools lined with drooping coco palms. There, the gulf stream is "bottled," and after ten o'clock in the morning the glare is terrific. On a sea of fire, where the white yachts riding at anchor seem as though caught in a jelly of light, the millionaires take their dip in frames of cement. All these people swimming suggest a kind of comical and methodic shipwreck, an organized catastrophe. Children bob about on inflated tires; goddesses from Park Avenue let themselves down, in clusters, from the slides. The gentlemen from Wall Street straddle those rubber ponies filled with air which have doubtless been adopted from the Indians of Peru, who have similar contrivances of straw. As soon as you attempt to paddle with the feet, they unhorse you. This is the same public, with the same amusements, as at the Lido. High overhead the vultures are soaring. The gramophone plays Hallelujah. On the crowded balconies, black Cubans, English officers, and American tourists are drinking exquisite chiroos, an anti-alcoholic beverage composed of fresh pineapple juice with one-third Italian vermouth and one-half gin.

January. . . . One's thoughts wander far; one thinks of skating, of skis, and of the ice which is found here only in the bottoms of glasses, with a cherry. . . .

If these sights seem artificial to you, and you desire to see a wilder sort of beauty, you must go to the French Antilles and to Haiti. I had neglected to say that there are still negroes in the West Indies. The ravages of European jazz have not yet caused a complete depopulation. Moreover, these authentic negroes do not know the music that we call negro, or they care little for it. Like everything else in the tropics, the phonographs go continuously, except for a short respite between three and five o'clock in the morning. "What shall we play for you?" some friends asked me at Haiti. "Why," I answered, "a negro melody!" . . . "Ah, no! anything but that." In Haiti I met a young coloured lawyer who told me that he had learned the Charleston last summer at Dinard. "On returning, I taught it to the French negroes of the old plantations," he said; "naturally they still dance the minuet and the old dances of the French court, to the sound of a flute muted with tissue paper. The Charleston was a great surprise to them, but they have come to like it. Finally the old aunts and the elderly generals of the Haitian army who have had to give up their favourite sport of civil war since the American occupation of the island, devoted themselves wholly to competing at the Charleston."

ONCE one has reached these islands, the main inconvenience is in leaving them. They would be within an hour of one another by aeroplane, but sometimes one must wait fifteen days for a boat. Furthermore, each steamship line serves only the Antilles under its own flag, which complicates matters still more. There are but few points of junction. Trinidad is one of them. There, boats bound from Europe for Colon cross with those going from North America to Brazil. Trinidad is inhabited by negroes, Hindoos, and retired old English colonels of the army of the Indies who angle for king fish, drag alligators from the Caroni River, and play bridge. But Kingsley's At Last, with its descriptions of the High Woods, will give sufficient idea of the island for all the sedentary who prefer to do their travelling indoors.

One of the most picturesque spots in the Antilles is Curagoa. You are set down abruptly in the midst of Holland. Lying low on a sea of fire, this is Amsterdam, Leyden, or Volendam that you discover of a sudden, at the end of a large canal which admits the boats to the interior—for the island is hollow like a bottle. A marvellous harbour, which could hold all the warships in the world; so marvellous in fact that one asks himself how the English happened in the course of history to leave it to the Dutch. All the oil of Maracaibo is brought from the coast of Venezuela to be refined at Curagoa; consequently, the island adds the smell of kerosene stoves to the fragrance of the bitter orange peel used in making that curagoa which is so sweet to the throat. .. . The island is mainly inhabited by Dutch Jews, who live in little red houses with terraces of steps. . . . But the blinding sun eliminates all graduation of shadow, and Rembrandt would have preferred Amsterdam. No language and every language is spoken—negro, Indian, Yiddish, Spanish, and English being mixed up into an agglomeration which goes by the pretty name of papimiento. Curagoa is a large free port; all currencies are exchanged there; one enters without a passport; one amuses himself among pals and without police. The island is the great gambling centre, pleasure resort, and smuggling base of the Antilles. The escaped convicts from the neighbouring Guyanas are the happiest and most peaceful of men, and carry on small businesses here, delighted to have exchanged their inferno for this paradise.

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And now Haiti. How treat, in a few lines, this Haiti to which one should devote a thousand volumes! One evening as I was dining with General R— , the American high commissioner, in his beautiful villa overlooking Portau-Prince, I could not recall without melancholy France's cruel loss of her loveliest Antilie through having wished to apply the principles of the great revolution to a coloured population which was not ripe for the advantages of a republic. In that section of the city which bears the old French name of Peu-de-Chose, the tropical houses of the American officers, with their hewn timbers and their awnings illuminated from within, seemed like Venetian lanterns. A programme broadcast from New York was in the air, while the moon lit up the immobile bay, with the zinc roofs separated by the black foliage of the mangoes. I thought in dejection how the French of the eighteenth century had been the true Americans of the period, which is to say the strong and enterprising people, carrying high the torch of the white race. Now, whenever the American engineers construct a road in Haiti, they always find beneath it the old highways built by the kings of France. Today, as I looked about the table and saw these American officers in white, and these handsome "Sammies" at attention behind them, I was almost consoled to observe that the earlier efforts made by Caucasions were now being carried on by other Caucasians.

One must see the French Antilles, Guadeloupe and Martinique. They are almost more primitive than the English, without comforts, without hotels, almost without roads; but for this very reason the beauties here are wild and the shores resemble the landscapes of Robinson Crusoe. Lafcadio Hearn's finest book, Two Years in the French Indies, was written on the Antilles, and has these two islands for its background. The negroes there are more beautiful than almost anywhere else. Since the departure of the wealthy colonists, i.e., since the end of the eighteenth century, Guadeloupe and Martinique have been inhabited solely by officials, and their one product is politics, that savoursome fruit so loved by the half-breeds. The bals doudou, the popular Saturday evening dances, almost surpass those of Africa in obscenity and violence. The women still wear the madras as a headdress. And all the picturesqueness of the lower Mississippi valley which is disappearing daily (while New Orleans, with its old French colonial traditons, maintains just enough of the old flavour to serve as bait for tourists), all this wealth of local colour still lives and thrives on the island of Josephine, the beautiful creole whom Napoleon loved and made an Empress. Her statue in marble, surrounded by a fence of coco palms, faces toward the sea at Fort-de-France. "Josephine!" I exclaimed, on descrying it. "What?" returned a pretty French modiste who had arrived from Paris on the same boat as I did.

"What, Josephine Baker already has her statue here?"