El museo

A wonderful attraction of our town was the museum, it was one of my favorite places. It also housed a biblioteca (although not a lending one) at which I spent a lot of time. The museum though is the subject of this vignette so I’ll leave the library for another time. The main exhibition hall was a large vaulted space enclosing an atrium illuminated by a several large skylights in the vault. This created a kind of enclosed two story cloister (how’s that for an oxymoron?). The peak of the roof in the center was probably 80 feet high. From the entrance, which was flanked by two bronze cannons pointed towards each other, one could see to the rear of the building where a double marble staircase led to a common landing and then more stairs swept up to a second floor gallery with balconies overlooking the main floor. It was very impressive. There were exhibit rooms off both galleries and access to enclosed yards on either side. One of the yards had a pool with a large crocodile (source of great trepidation especially for Ruth). The other had a couple of wandering iguanas, slightly less scary by comparison.
The exhibits were a mixed bag. One room was dedicated to numismatics; coins from all over the world dating back to ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were on display in large flat vitrines. Another hall contained an incredibly varied collection of shells mostly native to Cuba, little Erin would have loved it. Another room displayed butterflies (and other uglier insects) in incredible abundance and diversity. The second floor gallery housed a natural history collection (taxidermy) including an elephant and the exhibit that terrified Ruth almost as much as the live crocodile: the lioness. There was a story in our family that explained the provenance of the lioness. It was said that the beast had escaped from a circus and our great-grandfather had killed it with a single bullet in between the eyes. I do not know if the story is true or not - I do remember touching the bullet hole in the middle of the lioness’s forehead. Ruth and I always worried about ferocious beasts escaping from the circus and finding their way into our house, after all it happened once. The gallery also contained a number of specimens in formaldehyde filled jars – including the unknown baby - which although fascinating to us was not a proper topic for conversation.
The museum had a salon dedicated to the history of the Ferrocarriles de Cardenas (Railroad) and there (for a nickel) you could make a large model of a steam powered locomotive spin its wheels, blow its whistle and produce a pathetic puff of smoke. I loved this thing with passion, and no visit to the museum was complete without my seeing the wheels go around. However, since dad was just as cheap (or poor?) as the adult me, I usually had to wait for some other visitor to put the nickel in!
Amongst all the interesting and worthwhile things there were a couple of less significant items: One was a shrunken head that scared the bejeezus out of us, the other was a diorama of an ordinary couple wearing colorful dancing clothes. The cheesy part of it was that the couple was a pair of fleas, “Las Pulgas Vestidas”. The diorama was visible under a large magnifying glass and was a very popular attraction.