Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

He was a fellow southerner, an accountant who had his clientele among the American businessmen of the city and to whom had been entrusted the management of such offices. I remember that his name was Mr. Johnson; and this Mr. Johnson, having known Mr. Stanley and his brother in passing, had information that was both helpful and discouraging to me:

“I last saw Captain Stanley here four months ago,” he said. “But he stopped coming by about then. One of his boys told me he’d caught the yellow fever — or typhoid, I cannot say which. I made nothing of his absence, as he only spent a few days a week here and mainly used this address to receive his mail and to conduct some business. He had another office down by the waterfront. I did see his brother, Mr. Henry Stanley, on one occasion after that. He seemed in some kind of rush to gather up their books, which they kept in a safe, along with some money, I guess. When I asked him about Captain Stanley, he told me that he was still laid low, but that was all. He left one afternoon with a portmanteau, and since then he hasn’t been back. But if he’s still in the city, I would imagine that the best way to find him would be to inquire after him with the American shippers down by the harbor, or you could locate the Yankee consul, though I cannot say that you’ve come at the best of times to do so.”

“And Mr. Stanley’s office? Where is it?” I asked.

“Just there, at the end of the hall.”

The Stanley Bros. & Co. office was but a largish room, smelling still of lingering pipe and cigar smoke, its walls stained with threadlike trails of oil-lamp fumes. Piles of newspapers — old copies of the Daily Picayune and a local English-language Havana newspaper — were stacked in a corner. All manner of documents — bills of lading and such — were scattered about on the floor: Indeed there was a safe, its door still open, as were the drawers of a correspondence cabinet; and there was a big oak desk, and on the desk’s blotter were several crumpled letters written in Spanish, apparently (from what I could tell) regarding some transaction. These Mr. Stanley or his brother had apparently thought were of little importance. The general impression was that Mr. Stanley had left the premises in haste. Thinking myself in the midst of some kind of dream, I could barely speak, but Clemens, coolheaded and curious, decided to ask Mr. Johnson several questions:

“When you last saw Mr. Stanley, did he seem ill?”

“I saw him at a distance, and he seemed well.”

“Did he carry the portmanteau out himself?”

“I think he had a hand — some black boy, anxious for a wage, assisting him.”

“We thank you, sir,” Mr. Clemens said, and with that Mr. Johnson accompanied us to the head of the stairs. As we went down, he shouted after us: “Good luck to you both,” and, as an afterthought, “Long live the South!”

WE WERE INTENT ON MAKING our way to the harbor: If this failed to render useful information, we would inquire after him at the hospitals — there were two in the city — and if that bore no result, we would approach the American consul for help. But in any event, we were briefly detained by a sudden downpour, what the Cubans call an aguacero , according to Clemens’s guidebook, which he had brought along from New Orleans. It was a rain so profound that we were forced to take shelter in a bar at the end of the street. Though it was still before noon, we ordered several glasses of the local beer, and there we remained for about half an hour.

The downpour, like the torrents of a cataract, cooled things off for a while, but soon a steamy heat followed: Such was the tropical clime. We found a carriage parked out in the street, its driver, in a broad straw hat and rags, hunched over, with his stick in hand, dozing. My Spanish, though consisting of infantile fragments, was sufficient to communicate that we wished to be taken to “ los barcos americanos del puerto .” This he took to mean the sector of wharves along the seafront dominated by the warehouses and docks of various North American shipping companies, toward the southern end of the harbor. Taken down the paseo to the waterside and south along the ship-glutted docks, we came upon a scene reminiscent of bustling New Orleans, except that few of the frigates we saw were taking freight. Most, in from gulf ports, were being unloaded by fiercely worked slave gangs. Bales of processed cotton and crates lay out along the piers; and while the overseers barked out commands, a group of well-dressed Americans was gathered on the pier and engaged in heated discussion with some Cuban customs officials.

We approached one of these Americans, a tall and lanky man in a stovepipe hat, as to the whereabouts of the Stanley Bros. & Co. concern, but he seemed to have never heard of them, being new to the island. A second gentleman, however, directed us to the offices of the Ward Line Company, and there we spoke to an official who knew something of the Stanley brothers’ business, the Ward Line being their landlords. He then instructed one of his underlings to take us to a man named Jacob, who sometimes worked for the Stanleys. We passed through several warehouses and long, slop-filled alleys to reach the smallish room at the back of a loading dock that had apparently served as Mr. Stanley’s place of business in the harbor. Jacob, a somewhat dissipated-looking man, had been asleep on a cot: The room smelled vilely of urine and liquor. When roused, he was at first annoyed and unfriendly, his cantankerous manner no doubt influenced by the fact that he was jaundiced and probably not long for this world. But once I explained the purpose of our visit there, he told us, with the gleam of self-interest in his rheumy eyes, “Yes, there are ways that I can help you and things that I can relate, but I won’t do it here. First you must buy me some drinks, for I have a horrid headache and ain’t in no mood to speak to strangers otherwise.”

And so it was that we spent the remainder of that afternoon in a dingy harborside saloon, drinking from dirty glasses, and tolerating for several hours what seemed the incoherent ramblings of Jacob.

“What of Mr. Stanley?” I would ask, but he would go on — speaking of his own fatherless childhood and of beatings at the hands of ruffian urchins when he was a young boy; of jails and a long stint as a sailor and of somehow ending up in this sorry state in Cuba.

“But what of Mr. Stanley?” I asked again.

Finally, just when the saloon had filled up with a great number of unsavory types who had begun to regard our nice clothes and good shoes — and Clemens’s gold watch chain — with menacing interest, then did he speak of the man.

“Mr. Stanley was my one saving grace,” he said with sadness. “Worked for him and his brother, the captain, for nearly ten years. The captain was not a kindly man; he never understood why Mr. Stanley — who, it seemed, had a soft spot for lost souls — would give a drunk like myself a job. I worked hard for them, looking after their shipments out of port — that little office, that hovel, was my only home — and it is only through the indifference of the managers that I keep it even now.”

“But do you know where Mr. Stanley is?”

“The captain liked to give me a good beating for no good reason from time to time. Heaven help me if he whiffed a drink on my breath. Down would come the cane. So I was very happy that he caught the fever and died. Yes, he is dead. But then Mr. Stanley himself got the fever, and in his sickness he became a different sort of man — or maybe he was all grieved over his wife’s death, but I know that when I last saw him, a few months ago, he didn’t have much concern for me. Just gave me a few gold coins and told me that he was done with Havana and with many other things. But first he said that he would have to tidy up after some of his business affairs: You know, he and the captain had traveled all over this island. The very day he set out, I had the feeling I wouldn’t see him again, but I know where you will probably find him, if he’s still alive.”