Hemingway Adventure (1999) (6 page)

Someone shows me a copy of
Il Gazzettino
, one of two Venetian morning papers, which carries a report of our filming activities up in Fossalta. The Italian language bathes our mundane efforts in a Dante-esque glow. I come out as
‘Il cinquanta-cinquenne attore Inglese’
. It may only mean ‘fifty-five-year-old English actor’, but it makes me sound like the Renaissance.

We are here to recreate the true story of Hemingway sitting on this very terrace forty-five years ago, reading newspaper reports of his death after a plane crash in Africa. I put down
Il Gazzettino
and pick up a copy of the
New York Daily Mirror
for 25 January 1954 with the banner headline: ‘Hemingway Wife, Killed In Air Crash’.

He wasn’t killed but he was badly hurt, sustaining injuries to his skull, shoulder, spine, liver and kidneys. As soon as he was well enough to travel he took a boat to Europe and, for the second time in his life, found himself recovering from serious injury in Italy.

Once installed in the best room in the Gritti Palace - first-floor, on the corner, with balconies - he set about his treatment with a vengeance. The treatment consisted of a little luxury and a lot of champagne. But though Hemingway was an expert at recovery, his friend A. E. Hotchner, summoned to see him at the Gritti, could see that this time, things were different.

When I came into his room he was sitting in a chair by the windows, reading, the inevitable white tennis visor (ordered by the dozen from Abercrombie
&
Fitch) shading his eyes … What was shocking to me now was how he had aged in the intervening five months … some of the aura of massiveness seemed to have gone out of him
.

It didn’t stop Hemingway playing baseball with friends in his room. The ball, a pair of tightly rolled woollen socks, was hit so hard that it smashed clean through one of the windows and out into the street. According to Hotchner, the manager pointed out that no one had ever played baseball in any of the rooms throughout the 300-year-old history of the Gritti. For this reason he had decided ‘to reduce Signor Hemingway’s bill by ten per cent’.

Baron Franchetti, the man who can tell me more about Hemingway’s return to Italy, has agreed to see me. The address is as it should be, a palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal.

Though it has turned cold, and there are ominous reports of the worst winter weather for a decade heading this way, the Venetian sunlight, low and strong, highlights the delicate details on the buildings as we head up the Grand Canal. I’ve always found Venice absurdly theatrical and today it’s more like a stage-set than ever. Above us, figures in eighteenth-century tricorn hats, black cloaks and snow-white face masks are crossing the Accademia Bridge. This is the first day of the two-week carnival, an ancient festival that disappeared for 200 years, before being revived in 1975. Those in full costume are, sadly, a small minority compared to those wearing anoraks, sweat pants and floppy jester hats bought outside the station.

The palace of the Franchettis is approached via a narrow courtyard from which rises the world’s smallest elevator, which disgorges the occupant into a cramped passageway, which gives on to a long, gloomy room at the far end of which is a pair of glassed doors which open on to a huge and dazzling panorama of the Grand Canal.

Alberto Franchetti is a slim, slope-shouldered man around my own age. The word languid could have been coined for him. He speaks softly and moves with a feline grace and an unmistakably aristocratic lack of urgency.

I ask him what I should call him. Should it be Signor Franchetti, or perhaps Alberto? He purses his lips gently, as if acknowledging some distant, unspecific pain.

‘Perhaps, Barone?’ he suggests.

After this opening skirmish he is courteous and helpful. He lights a cigarette and we stand on the balcony and talk about Venice until it’s too cold and we have to come in. The Grand Canal has changed, he says, registering distaste. Not one of the hundred or so palazzos along it is still occupied by the family who built it. It’s noisy with all the boats and the continuous activity. His mother was the last person to keep her bedroom on the Grand Canal side of the palazzo.

Aware of the short time we have, I try to deflect him from the plight of the nobility and in the direction of Hemingway. He recalls him with faint amusement, protesting regularly that he was only ten at the time.

Hemingway was ‘very informal, very American’, he tells me. He wore clothes that seemed marvellously exotic to a European war baby, albeit a nobleman’s son, flying-jackets and big fur-lined boots and check shirts. He would be totally at ease with the servants and throw his arms round any pretty girl in a way which was unheard-of in structured Italian society.

‘He drove around in a limousine. A big Buick! In that time, no one in Italy, not even Giovanni Agnelli [the head of Fiat] drove around in a limousine.’

The Barone pauses, leans forward, extinguishes his cigarette and speaks with soft intensity.

‘He lived the legend, you see, he lived the legend.’

After an hour together we not only part on Michael and Alberto terms but he has invited us to come to the last duck-shoot of the season and see for ourselves what Hemingway liked so much about this particularly Venetian activity. He impresses upon me that duck-shooting is a serious business, with rituals and traditions stretching back five centuries. Its rules and regulations are essentially feudal, rural and zealously observed. Shooting takes place at dawn but the preparations begin the night before. I am given an address, driving instructions, and warned to bring very warm clothing, and a jacket and tie. Oh, and no girlfriends, it’s male only.

W
e find ourselves driving once again across the flat, gridlike scenery east of Venice, beyond the Piave, and across the Livenza, before turning off the autostrada towards the town of Caorle on the Adriatic coast.

Just before the town we turn into a narrow road which becomes a track which follows a network of irrigation ditches through an increasingly deserted agricultural landscape until it fetches up at a gabled, red-brick two-storey building that looks like a country railway station. This is the
casone
, the hunting lodge, at which the shooting party will soon assemble.

Before we left Venice the Barone briefed me about the formalities. Guests arrive around seven in the evening, drink and talk until it’s time to eat and drink, then, after eating and drinking, gather around an open log fire to play card games, tell jokes and drink. After that there are late-night drinks followed by various manly pranks, like making apple-pie beds for fellow guests, followed by maybe two hours’ oblivion before being woken at four for breakfast. After the morning shoot, the party returns to the
casone
to eat and drink before going home.

I am the first guest to arrive. The staff flit about adjusting, preparing and table-laying. I nose around. The buildings have been quite extensively tarted up in reproduction rustic style with shiny new brick and timber-clad walls on which hang old prints of hunters at work or lovingly painted depictions of the various kinds of duck they kill. The gun-rack in the hallway is predictable but not the stuffed black bear (shot in Romania) that rears up at the bottom of the stairs, nor the leopard skin stretched across one wall. I learn later that these were both victims of Alberto’s father, Nanyuki, who used to own this lodge and estate.

Car wheels crunch on the gravel outside and the guests begin to assemble. They are not as intimidatingly correct as I had feared, in fact our host is not a nobleman but a chicken millionaire from Vicenza.

There are ten of us for dinner and we barely fill half the great oak dining table. We eat by candlelight. All three courses are fish - apparently, it is not good luck to serve red meat before a shoot. Everything is locally caught and absolutely fresh, my host assures me, apart from the prawns which turn out to be from the USA. (They’re actually a lot more palatable than the rubbery local squid which defy all attempts at mastication.) The sea-food risotto and the local eel and gilt-head are beautifully prepared and Pinot Grigio is liberally poured. A local millionaire called Giuseppe, who has in his time shot everything, including polar bear, waxes wonderfully indignant about the Green movement and is apoplectic about our own royal consort.

‘Prince Philip,’ he shouts, veins bulging, banging the table, ‘head of World Wildlife Fund, kills two hundred pheasant in a day!’

By midnight the party is beginning to break up and some people are actually talking of going home before tomorrow’s shoot.

Alberto seems regretful.

‘There used to be some fun when everyone stayed here, eels in the bed, naughty pictures upstairs. No women,’ he adds wistfully.

‘No women at all.’

*

U
p before dawn. It is bitterly, bitterly cold, but the skies are clear and the stars abundant.

Slip a copy of
Across the River and into the Trees
into my pocket, for Hemingway’s descriptions of a duck-shoot on the frozen lagoon are amongst his most unforgettable images.

Outside the
casone
the flat-bottomed boats are ready for the hunters. I’m to shoot with Alberto, though not literally, as I’m very fond of ducks and anyway the hunting party would surely not appreciate a novice in such a serious endeavour. Alberto shrugs. ‘Hemingway did not take it so seriously. He would bring a book to read and a bottle of whisky’

Well, now I don’t feel so bad. Alberto checks his Beretta 12-gauge shotgun one last time and we clamber into the boat. A flock of wooden decoy ducks is gathered in the bows, and our boatman sits in the stern with his dog, which will later retrieve the fallen ducks.

‘In bocca al lupo!’
they shout to each other. For an alarming moment I think they may be calling for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In fact it means ‘In the mouth of the wolf,’ the traditional duck-shooters’ equivalent of the actors’ ‘Break a leg!’

Our boats set out in convoy, through the tall grass of the marshes, towards the lakes where our hides are located. This lagoon area, called the Valle, was created and laid out for private duck-shooting and, unlike much of the Veneto, it remains unencroached, wild and mysterious.

As the sun comes up we can see the snow-covered flanks of Monte Cavallo, fifty or sixty miles north, bathed in the rich pink glow of dawn. This makes Alberto uncomfortable. The air is too still, too clear. Duck-shooting is best done in foul weather when the wind out at sea drives the ducks back inland, over the lagoon.

Meanwhile the boatmen are standing and heaving on their oars. I can see Hemingway’s words in
Across the River
springing to life.

It was all ice, new-frozen during the sudden, windless cold of the night. It was rubbery and bending against the thrust of the boat-man’s oar
.

I’d never been that comfortable with ‘rubbery’ ice, but this morning I can see how well the metaphor works. The new ice does indeed bend and flex, clinging on to the oar as it enters the water and sticking to it as it leaves.

Having secured footage of oars and keels and picturesquely cracking ice, the director is happy and the boatmen are able to ship their oars and pull the outboards into life. I can see this pains a traditionalist like the Barone.

‘Motor-boats only came in the late sixties, you know.’ A smile flickers at the corner of his mouth. ‘Of course we all thought it was the end of the world. Like we did when the electricity pylons came in the fifties.’

After about half an hour the narrow channel broadens into a lake, in the middle of which is a tiny artificial island with two plastic barrels sunk into it. Each one is around four and a half feet deep and allows room for the swivel-seat shooting stools.

Alberto and I are put ashore and lower ourselves into our respective barrels. Our boatman throws the decoys into the water beside us then reaches into a cage and produces a number of real ducks which he drops unceremoniously overboard. These are the
vivi
, live ducks, tethered in the water, whose plaintive quacks will hopefully attract their over-flying colleagues within range of Alberto’s Beretta.

Alberto is no mean gun - only last week he bagged forty or more. But today things are slow, and he produces his duck-whistle to augment the cries of the
vivi
. Though it looks deceptively simple the whistle can, in the hands of an expert, produce all sorts of different sounds for the different breeds.

All we need now are the ducks. Everything else flies over - geese, swans, cormorant, but the ducks are giving us a wide berth. The one promising flock swings round and heads up from the south towards us.

‘Get down!’ cries Alberto. But the flock veers away at the last minute. ‘Probably mallard,’ comes Alberto’s disappointed voice from the barrel next to me.

Apparently mallard, being a native of these parts, are canny and used to hunters, whereas other ducks, from the sticks of Eastern Europe, passing over on their annual migration to the lakes of Central Africa, are less likely to suspect the presence of men pretending to be small islands.

As time passes, Alberto tends to embellish the qualities of his adversary - ‘Ducks are very intelligent, they see and hear well’ - at the expense of his own species: ‘Who is that by the camera wearing a red jacket? … Who is that idiot standing up?’ But most wounding of all is that the chicken millionaire in a nearby barrel has bagged four already.