Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“Yes,” I allowed, wondering what it would have been like to have experienced so happy a boyhood.

SETTLING INTO OUR BERTHS SOMETIME past midnight, we hadn’t bothered to change our clothes, for the voyage was brief enough, the ship coming into Matanzas harbor and dropping anchor about three that morning. As we had in Havana, we waited for smaller craft to transport us to shore, then groggily paid the fees, some two reales each — a reale was equivalent to six and a half cents, the price of an aguardiente . When we landed, in the bright moonlight, we were taken to a waterside inn near the quay.

The next morning we were awakened by a burning heat that made the prospect of sightseeing, which Clemens was always intent upon, a dispiriting possibility. Still, after breakfast, as we had some hours to kill before catching the only train to Limonar, at two-thirty, we left the inn for the center of the city, which, without the high temperature, would have been a quite pleasant place, as it was quieter and less hectic than Havana, with no beggars, lepers, drunken sailors, and few soldiers about; its citizens, in general, had about them a less debauched character; the planters we saw — for this was that province’s commercial center, sugar and tobacco flowing into it from the interior — were of a more elegant and unhurried nature and seemed healthier for it. They were usually clad in white linen suits (as opposed to the French-style dark suits of the serious businessmen of Havana) and wore broad felt hats, boots, and spurs, most of them riding through town on horses. I noticed they were an unusually handsome lot—“tropical Apollos,” Clemens called them — their skin sun-bronzed, their bodies strong and sinewy, their manner serene.

And the town was beautiful: Many of its houses seemed ancient, a result, I think, of the play of the sea upon the porous nature of the stones used in their building. As we traipsed about, without any idea of where we were going, Clemens delighted in the facts of his guidebook.

“Says here that the word matanzas means ‘slaughter’ in Spanish. Here, it says, is the site where the local Indians slaughtered a party of conquistadores long ago. Also, it says that the name commemorates a, quote, ‘sanguinary encounter between the Moors and Christians in Castile, Spain, centuries before, at a battleground called El Campo de Matanzas, just at the time when Columbus was about to embark for his American adventure’—unquote.”

Despite the blinding whiteness of the day, we were charmed by our surroundings, as the city had a quaint and unspoiled antiquity about it: Mules pulling high-wheeled carts plied its cobblestone streets; Spanish ceramic tiles, instead of street signs, were embedded into walls to mark a location; citizens moved quietly along. We came across a bullfighting arena, and the public buildings we saw were of a neoclassical architecture, with Doric columns adorning their facades: “Hence,” Clemens told me, “it’s also known as the Cuban Athens.”

From the distant terraces of wooded hills that rose behind Matanzas two small rivers flowed, and these divided the city into three or so sectors, each joined by a fine stone bridge: I had never been to Venice, but as we traversed such spaces, that is what came to mind. Indeed, more so than we had in Havana, we seemed in a foreign place.

Thirsty and overheated, and after taking in what we could of the city of Matanzas in so brief a time, we rode a carriage into the district south of the Río San Juan to the rail station: I should mention that east beyond Matanzas, railroads were practically nonexistent, only some fifteen hundred miles of American-style gauge having been put down, during the 1850s, to serve as transport for the most productive and fertile regions around Havana, mainly the large sugar plantations. These trains plied a route along a sparsely populated region, apparently of great beauty: Limonar itself was in the heart of the countryside to the southeast, some thirty miles away over the highlands from Matanzas. The train, to our reassurance, was of American manufacture, and the siding of our second-class car had markings that said it had been built by Eaton, Gilbert & Co., of Troy, New York — a long way, to be sure, from the remoteness of that place. Shortly, taking our seats among a handful of passengers, we left Matanzas.

As our train rose along an ascending grade into the hills, the harbor below became a pond of Mediterranean blue water, its houses cubes of dice, the land falling away beneath us in a succession of natural terraces, stately palm trees rising as far as the eye could see. And then, in the time it took Clemens to smoke six cigarillos, after our train slowly rose upon what seemed like an endless succession of curving track, the land began to flatten again, and we saw clusters of weepy, sad-looking trees with fronds that dropped to the ground and bore green melons; then countless banana trees and orange groves, neatly divided by avenues; such farms were separated from each other by miles of dense jungle, the foliage so thick and livid with bright tropical flowers that it was impossible to imagine how its birds, of bright plumage, passed through such woods. What fences or stone walls we saw were overgrown with lianas and creepers and blossoms. The air of that place was so pure and delightful that we began to doze, first Clemens, his head slumped against the window, then myself.

Whatever else I knew, I was far away from Wales.

We awakened when the train stopped to take on some produce at a way station in what seemed to be the middle of a sugarcane field; here, the Negroes and Chinese coolies who worked as brakemen and porters got off and, with machetes — cane knives— how well I would come to know them in Africa! — made their way among the high stalks, each cutting off a piece and stripping it of its rind to suck happily upon its pulp. The train would make four more stops along the way, each taking some twenty minutes or more, to load or unload whatever goods were coming from and going to the plantations, much as the riverboats did on the Mississippi, but here, in Cuba, there seemed to be no hurry about anything. Seeing as how some things were being unloaded, we decided to stretch our legs. Perhaps he was just tired, as we had not slept well the night before, but he had said little to me that morning, and I had feared, as I sometimes had with Mr. Stanley, that in my youthfulness I had been too enthusiastic in my gratitude for his friendship. I had made it my habit to express such sentiments to Mr. Clemens each and every day we were together. I should have remembered that he was not one for demonstrations of feeling, and I had resolved to stay mum about such declarations, though it was difficult. But as we stood there waiting, for all my intention to restrain myself, I told him: “Samuel, that I have you here makes a big difference to me. Surely you have chosen to accompany me out of concern for my safety — and if you hadn’t, who knows where I would be right now; surely not so close as I am to finding Mr. Stanley. Indeed, though you may feel some dismay at the foreignness of this place, know well that you have made me your lifelong friend.”

Clemens considered my words and said: “Look, Henry, I don’t mind tagging along with you, and I don’t mind that things seem a little different here: And in a way I’m kind of fascinated with this country; from what I can see this is one very interesting place, and it’s beautiful. But you’ve got to promise me something. Please don’t forget that some folks — namely, myself — don’t need to be reminded of their good deeds, or friendship, for that matter. It’s just something that happens between people sometimes. You understand?”