Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

We were planning to head for Matanzas the next evening, but it was my misfortune to come down with a renewed attack of the ague — and so it was that we lost three days. During those nights while I was laid low, Clemens began to frequent a large café just outside the old city walls called the Louvre, a haunt favored by the American shipping fraternity. Which is to say that Union and Confederate sailors and their captains and mates gathered uneasily there, for by that first week in April, 1861, the war seemed inevitable.

In that café, Clemens had found a southern captain whom he wanted me to meet: a surly bear of a man named Captain Bailey, who had a dead eye and had apparently known my father well. And so it was, when I had gotten better, that Clemens took me there. Why Clemens thought it important for me to meet Captain Bailey I cannot say, but shortly we found ourselves sitting across a table from the man, his left eye ghostly dull.

“I understand from your friend here that you are close to Mr. Stanley. Now, before I say my words, I must ask you what you know of him.”

It was a curious question.

“Well, sir — he is an old Georgia gentleman of refinement and education, a former minister who had become a commissions trader; he is a pious widower, with no children of his own. I am his adopted son, or will be, when I find him.”

“That is all well and good that you think this: But here is what I know of him — and I am telling you this, young man, to correct any mistaken notions you have of him.” He finished a glass of rum and filled it again from a bottle.

“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?”