They, like the banks, were crowded; companies of negroes sat over
dishes of mucous consistency and drank, with thick lips, liquors of
vicious dyes. The prodigious women, often paler than the men, drinking
with them, gabbled in a loud and corrupt Spanish and, without hats on
their sere crinkled masses of hair, were unrestrained in displays of
calculated or emotionally demented excitement.
A flat wagon passed, holding, on precarious chairs, a band furiously
playing an infernal jumbled music which, as it swelled, filled all the
occupants of the caf?s with a twitching hysteria. Subdued masculine
shouts were pierced by shameless feminine cries; lust and rage and
nameless intoxications quivered like the perceptible films of hot dust
on the air. Negroes, Haitians with the flattened skulls, the oily skin,
of the Gold Coast, and Jamaicans glowing with a subcutaneous redness,
thronged the sidewalks; and sharp-jawed men, with a burned
indeterminate superiority of race, riding emaciated horses, added to
the steel of their machetes revolvers strapped on their long thighs.
What, mainly, occupied Lee Randon was the nakedness of the passion
everywhere surcharging the surface of life. There was, in the sense
familiar to him, no restraint, no cover beyond the casual screens at
the backs of the restaurants; no accident to which the uncertain
material of life was subject was improbable; murder rasped, like the
finger of death on wire strings, at the exasperated sensibilities of
organisms exposed, without preparation, to an incomprehensible state of
life a million years beyond their grasp.
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