He also said he met six Torontonians in Jamaica, non-Jamaican Torontonians, and they spent the last four or five days of Amund’s stay together in Negril. He didn’t speak about Toronto with any Jamaicans, but these fellows told him that the big city is cosmopolitan and there are several hundred thousand Jamaicans living there. “These people I stayed with had nothing but praise for the Jamaicans living in Toronto. They say the police try to blame them for all the crime, but only the police believe that. The Toronto Jamaicans are the most friendly, decent, honest people. They have a lot of Jamaican friends, and these guys have been spending two weeks in Jamaica every year for fifteen years. They just love it. They have not a bad word about the Jamaicans at all, they behave themselves, and I think they’re being stereotyped.”
—
I told Amund the long version of the story about meeting my old high-school friend last night. When we got to the rosado cock-up preamble, he was incensed. “Nothing, no degree of ignorance, could justify the rudeness and anger of that man, even if it was his first day in Cuba. That’s the gringo attitude you see everywhere, the one that says they should be happy for me coming here, after all I’m superior, make them speak English. Maybe the waiter didn’t know it was rosé. People are allowed to make mistakes. It could always be sorted out. We’re only human. But then again I shouldn’t be too hard on the tourist, because it’s only human for him to react badly as well. It’s interesting – me personally, I’m not like that. I would have sat there, scratched my head, figured there must be some mistake, and called the waiter over. And maybe on another day this tourist would have acted more decently.”
He thought that was the whole story, so I said, “But that had to happen, don’t you see? If it hadn’t been for that incident, this miracle would not have happened.”
Amund’s eyes brightened. “Ohh!” he sighed in suspense and anticipation. He liked miracles.
So when I told him how that led to chatting with the nice fellow at the next table, and he turned out to be a friend of mine I thought had died twenty years ago, he was almost as stunned by it all as I was. “Oh man!” said Amund. “How weird is that!”
“Weird’s the word. And that was his last night in Cuba. He’s thirty thousand feet in the air as we speak, rushing away from us at a thousand miles an hour.”
Amund: I’m not a religious person at all, but…there’s something with destiny, I can’t really put my finger on any particular situations, but I’ve had those experiences that happened only because of other things that didn’t have anything to do with it, except put you in the time and place where something astounding happens. And it leaves you saying why, why did that happen? Things that just happen because of some other things that you would not expect, and this leads to this and this leads to that. There’s so many things happening that I can’t really explain and yet I do not believe in any God or any divine beings, I have not been able to recognize anything that has something to do with something divine. Maybe destiny is something connected to something divine, I don’t know. I have those things once in a while, and it makes you think. Was this coincidence, was this destiny, or what was it? I don’t know.
Dave: We have an instinct for fatalism and predestination that all the sophistication of the modern age won’t wash away. But I did have a premonition that I would meet somebody I knew in Cuba, because Canadians go to Cuba a lot. Like I wanted to be prepared and not drop dead with shock if I hear someone calling out my name. But that would have been different. That wouldn’t have been as interesting as this somehow. For instance, think how easy it would have been, even after meeting and chatting with Roger, to have gone our own ways without having recognized each other from the past. And even when he told me his name the first time, it didn’t register.
Amund: Yes. It is those moments you will memorize, or should I say remember, for the rest of your days.
Dave: At one point he told me something he remembered about me, and which I had completely forgotten, but when he told me it was as if a grapefruit had grown out of my head all of a sudden. And I think the same sort of thing was happening to him. But he was much more quiet about it.
—
I told Amund I’d been thinking of going to the zoo this afternoon. He wanted to come along. I was delighted to have such an excellent companion. He said he feels he knows the Havana Vieja area well enough after strolling around it for three days. Shall we share a taxi?
Then halfway to the zoo we mutually changed our minds, and ordered the cabbie to turn around and head to the Hemingway house, Finca Vigía, at San Francisco de Paula. He didn’t need any directions. As he made a U-turn, Amund was telling me that on the way in from the airport he told his cabbie he was anxious to improve his Spanish on this visit. The cabbie told him you’ve come to the wrong place. This is Cuban we speak here.
—
The second half of Islands in the Stream largely revolves around this place where we are now, the Finca Vigía, and about Calle Obispo, walking up and down along that street, and drinking at La Floridita and the other bars. The book is right up there with the best writing Hemingway ever did, outside of the best of the short stories, including the early Nick Adams stories. How wonderful if all his writing were this good, and how wonderful that so much of it is. But the bad stuff ranges from less good to more boring to unreadable. And many if not all assessments of what is good and bad in Hemingway will continue to change with every new reading.
Amund is drinking all this in. He enjoys my literary opinions. He has heard a lot about Hemingway, and is interested in everything about him, but has read nothing of him or about him. I’m whispering vital factoids and downright rumours in his ear as we climb the road to this grand literary shrine. It is high on a hill, with views of distant Havana Bay, Havana, and the Straits of Florida way off through the warm mist. It looks like the sort of place that could always attract a cool breeze, but oddly enough not today. Everything is still and uncomfortable. For some reason I’m not happy. The place irritates me. It’s not at all what I expected. I’ve always felt a certain way about the place whenever I’ve read descriptions of it. But now that I’m here, I can’t fault the descriptions of the place, but the atmosphere is different than I imagined, and sort of twisted. It’s like looking at a finger bone in a gold case and trying to imagine the saint.
Hemingway loved Cuba for sure, but it’s impossible to imagine him happy in this house. It’s not something he would talk about in his books, and I suppose I’ll have to read his letters from this period. But no, this is not Hemingway. The place in Key West is more Hemingway. Also one suspects that in some strange way Hemingway, without realizing it, had bad luck with high altitudes. His stories about the Italian and Swiss Alps are never pleasant, he was always crashing planes into mountains in Africa, he couldn’t possibly have liked living here so high above everything, and he was so unhappy in the mountains of Idaho he shot himself. He was only happy in low-lying places, like Paris, Toronto, Upper Michigan, Key West, Cozimar, Habana Vieja. I think a diviner would not have been pleased with the underground currents below the Finca Vigía. I felt something dark drawing the energy out of me a mile a minute. I didn’t say anything to Amund, though I think he felt it too. Even though we were privileged to be allowed to wander throughout the building wherever we wanted, there was no pleasure in seeing the soggy old books in their sagging old shelves, and old-fashioned record albums displaying an advanced ear for classical music (Rachmaninoff and Ravel) and a retrograde one for jazz (more Bix Beiderbecke than Basie), the mildewed old Life Magazines, and the wretched oil paintings of Hemingway that look as if they were copied from photographs, or maybe from photos of original paintings of other photos, and the bullfight posters that look like descendants of the ones that would have been on the wall when Il Papa was here.
The animals whose heads are on the wall, or whose hides are on the couch or on the floor, look better than the other stuff. The place was cluttered, the furniture didn’t match the layout, there wa
s no elegance about the place, it was clunky, graceless. It felt damper than it should have felt. There was a rot in it that it couldn’t shake. It was too remote, unlike his earlier digs in Key West that had been closer to downtown, his favourite bars a five-minute walk.
We were surprised to be getting inside the sacred sanctuary. I think we paid a bit extra, plus Amund might have paid an extra dollar to take photos. I think one of the señoritas at the door wanted five dollars to take photos, and when Amund went to pay it the other one cautioned her to just charge him one dollar. Can’t be sure. Cuba: so different, so much the same.
The furniture here is not in Hemingway’s grand style and has not held up well. The beds seem to have been lifted from a clearance sale at a derelict hotel. Some of the books on the shelves are old library books. Either his valuable books have been squirrelled away and replaced with junk, or Hemingway was too cheap to pay his library fine. There are many paperbacks from the 1950s, and here’s a curved candle with a handwritten notice saying that it has bent over “into the form of a tusk.”
—
The view over Havana would have been smoggier than in Hemingway’s day. No wonder we had such a hard time breathing on the way up here in that old beat-up Lada with diesel exhaust gushing through the floorboards. But it would take more than one Lada to ruin this landscape. It would be pretty at night. Trees have been removed to give views from the tower. Amund had the eyes of a hawk. I was saying we should be able to see the Plaza de la Revoluçion, and he helped me by locating the Capitolio, just beyond the radio tower, then you go “one and a half knuckles” to the left of that, and there it is. Down there, it’s an hour’s walk from the Capitolio, up here it’s a thumb’s width. And, for nights when he couldn’t get away, here is Hemingway’s telescope. Or is it?
There is a stuffed lion here more depressing than the one in Cárdenas. “Look at the eyes,” says Amund. “They look like tennis balls painted green, and with black dots for pupils.”
—
In Hemingway’s military library hangs a pretty good painting of the great man kneeling next to a dead leopard. Papa seems only marginally happier than the leopard. There are maybe a hundred books in this room, with titles such as Instructions to Young Sportsmen in All That Regulates to Guns and Shooting, Hitler and His Admirals, Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, and it strikes me that this is the stuff he’d have been reading, in this spot, in the period leading up to 1942 when his anthology of war writing was published, Men at War, which was one of my greatest reading experiences in my early teens. Amund excitedly leaps upon a Norwegian edition of a novel written by Hemingway. The title translates as “The One Against the Many.” I suggest it may be To Have and Have Not. He’s dubious.
—
There are windows all around, and it must have been pleasantly cool up here, in the tower, on a hot day, spying on his neighbours, and reading books, and writing a line or two now and then, with the giant palm fronds brushing the windows as they sway in the breezes. Hemingway was a great admirer of the royal palm, and there is a regal row of six of them in immediate view of this window, growing out of the foot of this hill, but looking down at the top of the tower. One of the guides was telling us all about Hemingway’s final days in Idaho, which she thought was in Canada, an understandable mistake. Amund wanted to know why Hemingway was so discouraged and so depressed after leaving Havana. I gave him a list of the reasons that make sense to me, given that few kill themselves for just one reason, but the one Amund thought made most sense was that Idaho must seem terribly grey and gloomy after twenty years in Cuba.
After a while I got bored with playing the what-is-original and what-isn’t game. It’s been forty-five years since Hemingway left this house. The sad empty austere grey swimming pool here is much larger and deeper than the one at Key West, but not as playfully colourful. It also has a sombre, faded art deco closing-day theatrical look, with the stairs leading down into it being curved and concentric like the steps in a Busby Berkeley musical after the show is over and all the film’s been shot. And there must have been a lot of film shot at parties around this pool. Where is all this film now? And an old authentic 1930ish clunker of a wood-and-steel chaise longue wide enough for two. Lugging that chaise longue around would be a big job for the servants.
Then there is the actual Pilar (similar to the Granma but half its size). During the Second World War, Hemingway used this cabin cruiser for other things besides fishing. For instance, he had it fixed up with a machine gun and used it to patrol the Caribbean for German U-boats. It’s to his credit that none was found: it’s thought that the Germans heard what Hemingway was up to and stayed out of that area. Amund was interested in whatever we could dredge up in connection with what we were seeing. He claimed to know beans about boats, but was impressed by this one. “Look at the woodwork, and all the hinges and shackles. I know when I see a beautiful thing. To me this is beautiful, because of the curves, and the lines, the bow of the boat, the straight line going down to the sea, and the end or the aft.”
This boat had been built in Key West, and in the film version of To Have and Have Not, with Bogie and Bacall, the boat they use is similar, but it looks smaller in the film – but then again boats always look smaller when they’re in the water. Amund knew all the stories about Bogie and Bacall, but had never seen them together in a movie.
Did Hemingway install that high swivel-chair? Amund laughed at the holes in the arms of the chair to keep a drink steady. I said, You can’t expect Hemingway to go out looking for U-boats without being half-pissed. Amund said, That makes sense though because if he was going out looking for German submarines he’d have to be high up, to see above the horizon. I said, That’s true, you could see miles farther at sea by just climbing a few steps. Amund said, It seems to be in pretty good shape though, the boat. Even though it may need a paint job in some places. It seems pretty well preserved, and I guess the climate here is pretty dry. I said, It’s in better shape than a lot of things in Cuba for sure. And I also said, I’ve read all his books, some of them many times, but I’ve only read about one and a half of the biographies. He said, I don’t know, reading a lot of biographies can screw up your mind, I think. He meant in terms of trying to sort out all the differing opinions about some little event in Hemingway’s life could turn into a big time-sink. He said, You should keep in mind your own opinions. I said, I’m glad I saw this. Amund said, Oh yeah, absolutely.
Hemingway referred to the great fortress guarding Havana as the Morro, and he was caught in a storm just off the Morro on one occasion, if his fiction can be trusted. He says to his cat, Boise, in Islands in the Stream, “I wish you could have seen us come into the mouth of the harbour, with the sea breaking over the Morro. You’d have been spooked, boy.”
We all know where the Pilar is, but nobody knows what happened to Hemingway’s shiny black 1955 Chrysler New Yorker. When he left Cuba he gave that car to some army colonel who had done him a good turn. The colonel later became fed up with Fidel and fled for Florida, without the car. Before he fled, he hid the car somewhere, but nobody knows where he hid it.
—
Unfortunately the cabbie, Luis, who had driven us up to the Finca in his smelly old Lada, waited for us although we had pleaded with him not to. We were hoping to get a nicer cab. But now he is taking us back to the Hotel Lido, with horrible black smoke coming up through the floorboards. There is no sign that it is bothering Luis, but both Amund and I feel sick. We have headaches. We can’t wait to get back to the hotel. And have a nap. We are so exhausted by the exhaust. In retrospect the hazardous effects of the trip up may have coloured the visit to the Finca, and ill-disposed both Amund and me toward appreciating the ghostly relics and artifacts. It was as if the intense pleasure a lifelong Hemingway fan would have taken in visiting the Finca had been stolen away by airborne poisons. Our second dose is more immediate and more debilitating. Luis refuses to give any distance to the vehicle ahead, usu
ally a slow-moving one belching out tons of diesel exhaust to add to our woes in the back seat.
I told Amund that another irony of meeting Roger in Havana is that the last time we saw each other, many of these cars were brand new, or not so old. Fate has an archaeology all its own. Amund said, “It’s not every day you meet someone you haven’t seen in forty years.”
After all those fumes we staggered to our rooms for an afternoon nap, mine being interrupted at an early stage by a call from Mimi. She invited me to go with her to the Alliance Française, to meet her there. She was attending some kind of function there, and the French ambassador would be in attendance. It was over by the Plaza de la Revoluçion. I said I’d love to come except I had to continue my nap owing to diesel-fume poisoning. So we arranged to meet at the Parque Central at 8 p.m.
The north wing and the south wing of that park are dark, but the spectacular extra-large José Martí statue, dating from 1905, is brightly illuminated. There are some steps leading up to the base of the statue, and you can walk around it. So I innocently decided I’d go up there and sit on the retaining wall/balustrade sort of thing. That way I could see her from a long way off. No need to lurk in the shadows. It didn’t occur to me it might be unwise to try to share the spotlight with José Martí. I’m not proud of how I handled what ensued, but feel compelled to record it truthfully.
I didn’t think anyone else could see me because I was up high, and who looks up high these days? All the nocturnal parklike activity was happening below me, and outside the umbra of the spotlights. About forty black guys were having a powerful discussion, but I could not catch the drift. They were oratorically overriding each other with such enthusiasm, all talking at top speed and top volume at the same time, hoping something they say will register with the others, or will otherwise cancel out someone else’s brilliant syllogism. The bunch of them became one organism, and this giant amoeba kept drifting all over the park, like one slow-moving hurricane, while the waving of their hands and the passion of their voices were engaged at top speed. The excitement was at a fever pitch, but there was no hostility whatsoever. It’s hard to get in a fight in Cuba, there is a great tolerance for differences of opinion. I kept thinking this is Fidel’s battle of ideas going on, and me with the serenity of a bird’s-eye view. They all were tall powerful men with a lot to say and nobody outside the group was paying the slightest attention to them. So concentrated were they on the issue at hand they seemed not to realize that they were moving, as a unit, slowly, out from the shadows of the leafy southern end of the park into the heavy illumination of the Martí statue, so close I had to pull my dangling feet up out of the way. Then, slowly, they went back again into the shadows, still outshouting each other, so I dangled my legs again. Then an old fellow came by and gave me a quizzical look. I gave him a quizzical look right back. Then he gave me another quizzical look, even more quizzical than the first, and walked off.
An Innocent in Cuba Page 40