Papa Hemingway (2 page)

"Sure. What do I do?"

"Members of the order eat the heads and tails." He bit off a shrimp's head and crunched it happily.

I bit off a head and crunched it, but not happily.

"It grows on you," he said, picking up another. Two more vases of daiquiris arrived. The bartender handed Hemingway a letter; he looked at the return address, folded it and put it into his pocket. "Basque friend of mine is a prolific letter writer and each letter ends the same way: Send money." The trio, which consisted of a big, happy guitarist, a serious, unsmiling guitarist, and a thin, dark-skinned vocalist who also played the maracas, began to play and sing a spirited number.

"Pals of mine," Hemingway said. "They're singing a song I wrote for them. Wish Mary was here. She sings it best. One night we were in here, bar crowded, everyone having a good time, when in came three eager young gents to have a drink at the bar, and they have FBI written all over them. So I send word to these boys and at the stroke of midnight they break into 'Happy Birthday' in English, everyone joining in, and when we get to 'Happy birthday, dear FBI,' those three J. Edgars nearly caved in. They cleared out fast."

We chain-drank daiquiris and discussed Havana as a place to live and work. "Character like me," Hemingway said, "the whole world to choose from, they naturally want to know why here. Usually don't try to explain. Too complicated. The clear, cool mornings when you can work good with just Black Dog awake and the fighting cocks sending out their first bulletins. Where else can you train cocks and fight them and bet those you believe in and be legal? Some people put the arm on fighting cocks as cruel? But what the hell else does a fighting cock like to do?

"Then there's the bird population—wonder birds, truly—resident and migratory, quail that drink at the swimming pool before the sun comes up. And lizards that hunt out of the arbors at the pool and the vines on the house. Am very fond of lizards.

"You want to go to town, you just slip on a pair of loafers; always a good town to get away from yourself; these Cuban girls, you look into their black eyes, they have hot sunlight in them. If you don't want to get away from yourself, you can shut out everything by not going to town and jamming the phone.

"A half hour away from the
finca
you've got your boat set up so you're in the dark-blue water of the Gulf Stream with four lines out fifteen minutes after you board her. Or maybe you feel like shooting live pigeons at the shooting club just down the way from the
finca.
Matches for big money if that's the way you want it. That's the way we had it when Tommy Shevlin, Pichon Aguilera, Winston Guest and Thorwald Sanchez were around to make teams, and you can't ask for better shoots than when the Dodgers are training and we have match-ups with Hugh Casey, Billy Herman, Augie Galan, Curt Davis and some of the others who are all crack shots. The same people who crusade against fighting cocks also blast you for the pigeon shoot. Although it's barred in a lot of places it's legal here and it's the most exciting betting-sport I know—for the shooters. To watch it is a deadly bore."

"But doesn't it get monotonous to go through an entire year without changes of seasons?" I asked. "Don't you miss the spring and fall the way it is in New England?"

"We have changes in the seasons here too," he said. "They are subtle, not abrupt as in New England, where our parents took off from because it was cropped out and the soil no damn good. But let me have Red Lodge, Montana, or even Cody, Wyoming, or West Yellowstone, with Big Jim Savage dealing off the bottom of the deck so wonderful that only the boys can see it, or Billings on a Saturday night, or even, hell, Casper, which is an oil town where Miss Mary was hospitalized."

The daiquiris kept coming as we discussed Robert Flaherty's documentary films, which Hemingway greatly admired, Ted Williams, the Book-of-the-Month-Club, Lena Home, Proust, television, swordfish recipes, aphrodisiacs, and Indians, until eight o'clock, not threatening the Hemingway daiquiri-record but setting an all-time Hotchner high of seven. Hemingway took a drink with him for the road, sitting in the front seat of the station wagon next to his chauffeur, Juan; and I somehow managed to retain in the rum-mist of my head that he was going to pick me up the following morning to go out on his boat. I also managed—don't ask me how—to make some notes on our conversation for the benefit of the
Cosmopolitan
editor. This was the beginning of a practice I followed during the entire time I knew him. Later on I augmented these journals with conversations recorded on pocket tape transistors that we carried when we traveled.

There were two Pilars in Hemingway's life: one, the lusty partisan of
For Whom the Bell Tolls;
the other, a forty-foot black and green cabin cruiser—both named after the Spanish shrine. The seagoing
Pilar
was docked in the Havana harbor, ready to roll when we got there. It had a flying bridge with topside controls, outsized riggers that could handle ten-pound skipping bait, and the capacity to fish four rods. Ernest introduced me to her with old affection.

First, though, he introduced me to a lean Indian-skinned man who was Gregorio Fuentes, mate on the
Pilar
since 1938. Went to sea when he was four," Ernest said, "out of Lanzarote in the Canaries. Met him at Dry Tortugas when we were stormbound there. Before Gregorio, had another wonderful mate, Carlos Gutierrez, but somebody lured him away with more dough while I was away in the Spanish Civil War. But Gregorio is a marvel: got
Pilar
through three hurricanes with his absolute seamanship, is a peerless fisherman, and cooks the best pom-pano you ever tasted."

The big engines turned over; Ernest climbed topside and steered her out of port, past Morro Castle, and up the coast about seven miles, toward the fishing village of Cojimar, which was destined to be the village of
The Old Man and the Sea.
Gregorio set out four lines, two with feathers, two with meat bait. I was topside with Ernest.

He took out some tequila and we both had a sip to see if it was cold enough. "It's getting there," he said. "Wish you had been along on the last trip. The kids were down on ten days' vacation and I took them to Cay Sal and Double-Headed Shot Keys in the Bahamas. We caught around eighteen hundred pounds of game fish, turned three big turtles, got lots of crayfish and had wonderful swimming. That water is almost virgin fishing and the kids had a wonderful time."

He then began talking about the
Pilar
with extraordinary pride. "She sleeps seven but in the war she slept nine."

"She was in the war?"

"From 1942 to 1944 we turned her into a Q-boat and patrolled the waters off the north shore of Cuba. Antisub. Worked under Naval Intelligence. We posed as a commercial fishing boat but changed
Pilaris
disguise several times so it didn't look like any one boat was fishing too much. Had thirty-five hundred dollars' worth of radio equipment in the head; the actual head was however you could manage over the side. We had machine guns, bazookas and high explosives, all disguised as something else, and the plan was to maneuver ourselves into a position where we were hailed and ordered alongside by a surfacing U-boat. A U-boat not on alert could have been taken by our plan of attack. Crew was Spanish, Cuban and American, very good at their jobs, all brave, and I think our capture attack would have worked."

"But you never got a chance to try it out?"

"No, but we were able to send in good information on U-boat locations and were credited by Naval Intelligence with locating several Nazi subs which were later bombed out by Navy depth charges and presumed sunk. Got decorated for that."

"Was Gregorio along?"

"Sure. I explained to the crew the dangers involved, since
Pilar
was no match for any U-boat that wanted to blast it, but Gregorio was very happy to go out because we were insured ten thousand dollars a man and Gregorio had never figured he was worth that much. Quarters very cramped but crew got along fine. No fights. One tour we stayed out fifty-seven days."

"Feesh! Feesh, Papa, Feesh!" Gregorio was calling from the stern. We looked quickly starboard; I saw brown flashing that turned to dark purple, pectoral fins that showed lavender, the symmetry of a submarine. "Marlin," Ernest said, "let's go." He took hold of the topside rail and swung himself down. Gregorio handed him the rod with the meat bait. "Ever boat one of these?" Ernest asked.

"Never been deep-sea fishing."

"Then cut your teeth on this," he said, handing me the rod. I felt a touch of panic. Here was one of the world's great fishermen, a lightning-fast marlin whose size I couldn't believe, a big, complicated rod and reel—and here was I, who had never caught anything larger than a ten-pound bass out of my friend Sam Epstein's rowboat off Southold, Long Island.

But I had not reckoned with a quality of Ernest's I was to observe and enjoy many times over the ensuing years: his superb skill at instruction and his infinite patience with his pupil. In a quiet, even voice Ernest guided me every step of the way, from when to pull up to set the big hook in his mouth to when to bring him in close to be taken. A half hour later we were looking down at the beauty of that boated marlin; "We just might have a new
syndicat des pecheurs—
Hotchner and Hemingway, Marlin Purveyors," Ernest said. I realized that he had tentatively knighted me as a potential co-adventurer; for thirteen years it was to be an invigorating, entertaining, educational, exasperating, uplifting, exhausting, surprising partnership.

As we returned from the boat to the Nacional, Ernest made his first and only reference to the note I had sent him on The Future of Literature. I was going back to New York the following morning, and we were shaking hands on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. "The fact is I do not know a damn about the future of anything," he said.

I was startled by the abrupt reference. "Oh, sure, just forget . . ."

"What are they paying?"

"Fifteen thousand."

"Well, that's enough to perk up The Future of Literature in itself. Tell you what—send me tear sheets or manuscripts of what any of your other master minds have written so I get the pitch. Also a contract. If it still legally checks out that pieces contracted for by a bona-fide nonresident and written outside the States are tax-free so long as the nonresident stays out of country twelve consecutive months, then will write a good straight piece about what I think and will try to straighten up and think as good as I can."

Over the years, with the exception of 1956 and 1957, when I was living in Rome, I visited Ernest in Cuba at least once a year, often more, and daiquiris at the Floridita, pigeon shoots, excursions on the
Pilar
, and days at the
finca
became familiar. There was often a "business" reason behind these Havana trips and other trips to meet Ernest elsewhere in the world, but his approach to dealing with business matters was widely circuitous. He invariably allotted a minimum of two days to "cooling out"—I from the trip, he from working or if not working, then from some mysterious pressure he never clearly identified. We would cool out by indulging in the local distractions—if in Cuba, fishing, shooting pigeons, attending jai-alai matches and betting on them, matching Ernest's stable of fighting cocks and so on; if in Ketchum, Idaho, the cool-out was hunting the wild duck, goose, pheasant, elk, deer, dove, chukker, Hungarian partridge, and cooking and eating same; the Spanish cool-out was all aspects of bullfighting, the Prado, touring, eating, drinking and joining the
ambiance.
I said the minimum was two days.

The maximum? I went to Spain in June, 1959, to discuss a series of Hemingway-based special dramas that I was destined to write and produce for the Columbia Broadcasting System. I met Ernest in Alicante on June 28th, and on August 17th, as we were riding back from the bull ring, he said, "Been thinking about those television plays. Let's talk about them."

Six months after my first visit I returned to Havana. The fifteen thousand dollars had been advanced but the article on The Future of Literature had not been written. Instead, Ernest had an alternate idea that he wanted me to come down to discuss. The little town of San Francisco de Paula, where Ernest's Finca Vigla (Lookout Farm) was located, was itself a poverty-stricken shambles. But the Hemingway property was fence-enclosed and consisted of thirteen acres of flower and vegetable gardens, a cow pasture with a half-dozen cows, fruit trees, a defunct tennis court, a large swimming pool, and a low, once-white limestone villa which was a bit crumbled but dignified. Eighteen kinds of mangoes grew on the long slope from the main gate up to the house that Ernest called his "charming ruin." Immediately in front of the house was a giant ceiba tree, sacred in voodoo rites, orchids growing from its grizzled trunk, its massive roots upheaving the tiled terrace and splitting the interior of the house itself. But Ernest's fondness for the tree was such that despite its havoc, he would not permit the roots to be touched. A short distance from the main house was a white frame guest house. Behind the main house, to one side, was a new white gleaming three-storied square tower with an outside winding staircase.

The walls of the dining room and the nearly fifty-foot living room of the main house were populated with splendidly horned animal heads, and there were several well-trod animal skins on the tiled floors. The furniture was old, comfortable and undistinguished. Inside the front door was an enormous magazine rack that held an unceasing deluge of American and foreign-Ian-guage periodicals. A large library off the living room was crammed with books that lined the walls from the floor to the high ceiling. Ernest's bedroom, where he worked, was also walled with books; there were over five thousand volumes on the premises. On the wall over his bed was one of his favorite paintings, Juan Gris' "Guitar Player." Another Gris, Miro's "Farm," several Massons, a Klee, a Braque, and Waldo Peirce's portrait of Ernest as a young man were among the paintings in the living room and Mary's room.