He must, however, prepare himself against the betrayal he was able to trace so clearly in others; there could be no faltering, no remorse; he was cut off from the ordinary solaces, the comfortable compactness, of general living. But, already, temperamentally, he liked, preferred, this; alone, never for a minute was he lonely. The inattention to home, primarily the result of a new scene and of exciting circumstances, had grown into an impersonal fondness for his family; he failed to miss them, to wish for their presence. The only element that remained from the past was his love for Andrés Escobar; he confronted it valorously, deposed it from his mind, but it clung around his heart. How fortunate it was that Andrés could not detach him from his resolve; it was unthinkable that one should stand in the way of the other.
These reflections occupied his mind at various times and places: one day in the American Consulate on Obispo Street; again at the steamship office on Mercaderes; over his cigarette and cheese and jelly at the Noble Havana; strolling along Ricla Street where the principal shops were congregated; at a dinner party in the Palace of the Conde de Santovernia. He was aloof. All the activity that absorbed the people among whom he went was to him trivial, utterly of no consequence. Sometimes he would walk through the stalls of the Mercado de Cristina, on the Plaza Vieja, or in through the Honradez factory on Sol Street, where a handful of cigars was courteously given to any appreciative visitor. He would return along the Paseo de Valdez to the park where he had sat when he was first in Cuba, and, as then, the strains of the military band of the Cabañas drifted across the bay.
The dwelling of the Captain-General, with the Royal Lottery on the ground floor, had before it sentries in red and white; the Quay de Caballeria, reached through the Plaza of San Francisco, was tempered and pleasant in the early dusk, and at the Quay de Machina was a small garden with grotesque rosy flamingoes and gold-fish in the fountain. He sat, as well, lonely, considering and content, in the Alameda de Paula, where, by the glorieta, it was called the Salon O'Donnell. The moats, filled with earth, truck gardens, the shore covered with sugar pans, engaged his absent-minded interest. With the improvement of his Spanish, he deserted the better known cafés and restaurants, the insolence of the Castilian officers, for modest Cuban places of food, where he drank Catalan wine, and smoked the Vegueros, the rough excellent plantation cigars.