by Norman Lewis
I spent the next day working out the arrangements for the journey to the Sierra with Vaquero, the Castro agent who liked to see gangster films. Scott seemed to want to impress me that his talk of duels was not to be taken lightly, and he took me up to a private shooting gallery in the form of a long room extending the length of the building of the offices of the Havana Post. The far end of this had been fixed up with an arrangement of the kind that might have been used in a fair booth, in which playing cards were clipped to wires in a way that allowed them to move laterally at varying speeds, and intermittently to jerk up and down.
Scott produced two strange and sinister-looking pistols that used liquid carbon dioxide to propel the bullets, and were not quite silent in use. He set the cards in motion, bobbing and ducking on their wires, and, one following the other, we took aim. ‘Let’s see you shoot out a few pips,’ Scott had said, but I failed to do so, and so did he.
‘Pst … missed it again. Pst … this isn’t my day. Pst … not again! I don’t believe it. Pst … I’m not altogether happy with the way these fit into the hand. May have something to do with it. Hang on while I slow the thing down.’ Neither of us even hit a card. I expected no better of myself, but for someone who was a quarter of James Bond it was not good enough, and it did occur to me that it might even be as well for him if Hemingway did turn down the challenge.
Acting on instructions, I took the plane to Santiago, the most unspoiled of all colonial Spanish provincial towns at the eastern end of the island. As I came in to land, it appeared as a complex child’s toy of houses like coloured boxes, parks, promenades and churches, scattered through the fields. There had clearly been an upsurge in rebel activity since Matthews had been there, for within minutes of our take-off from Havana the co-pilot came back excitedly to point out a cane-field fire. This was a new form of protest that infuriated the Cuban communists whose policy all along had been to work with the dictator as far as possible, and thereby to squeeze what small concessions from him they could.
At Santiago the dragon of wealth had been confined to its cavern and this beautiful city was still made up of perfectly proportioned wooden houses, built often by the ancestors of those who now lived in them, in the most unerring taste. In lifestyle, culture and taste the city was completely separate from Havana and longed to free itself from the domination of the capital. Nevertheless, Havana had succeeded in imposing its rule, and perhaps this had been all to the good, for since those early days Santiago had never been able to afford the development that would have ruined it. Aesthetically, everything fell into place under a mantle of gracious poverty. It was early evening when I arrived and I made for the cool of central park where the lamps in their elegant Victorian standards glowed palely among the trees, and the small ceramic-tiled benches were S-shaped so that you almost faced the person with whom you shared one, and with whom by local custom you were expected at least to exchange a few words. They seemed to be occupied largely by grey-haired intellectual old Negroes.
‘Tell me, sir, what is your opinion of Emmanuel Kant?’ my neighbour wanted to know, after which our conversation veered off in the direction of religious belief. ‘Do you agree with St Paul that we shall rise from the dead?’ In the background children were exploding fireworks, and well-behaved pigeons strutted up to peck respectfully at our toes in the hope of the reward of a few grains of the corn that many of the regulars who came here carried in their pockets.
Santiago was famous for its clairvoyants, in particular one called Tia Margarita, and as arrangements had been made that I should spend the night in the town, and I had time on my hands, I went to see her. Someone had told me that one person in three in Cuba, regardless of colour or social status, was a secret adherent of one of the cults introduced by the Negro slaves, and Tia Margarita, high priestess of Chango, was said to be consulted by Batista himself.
She proved to be a comfortable-looking middle-aged black woman of compelling humour and charm, living in a small surburban house with a garden full of sweetpeas, attached to the usual straw-thatched voodoo temple. Women of her kind were to be found in every town in Cuba, combining in their operations all the exciting mumbo-jumbo of horoscopy and divination with the real social service performed in solving personal problems of all kinds, and in treating the sick from a repertoire of herbal remedies.
Tia Margarita ushered me into a chamber cluttered with the accessories of her trade—the skulls of small animals, the withered bats and the dusty salamanders—gently kicking aside the live piglets and cockerels that would provide the material for future sacrifices. A faint culinary odour suggested the preparation of her celebrated remedy for nervous tension—a thick soup made from the bones of dogs. I added my contribution—a pair of dark spectacles—to the homely offerings, which included roller skates, tubes of toothpaste, and a jar of Pond’s Cold Cream, stacked under the war-god’s altar. I noted the framed autographs, offered in gratitude by famous personalities—senators, baseball-players and motor-racers—who had come here with their troubles. Everywhere in Latin America one encounters these wonderful old spoofers who at least teach people how to put up with life.
The mild, maternal eyes scanned my face, and her expression was one of slightly puzzled amusement. She expected to be called upon to demonstrate her speciality by forecasting the exact date of my death, instead of which I asked her what the people of Santiago thought about the war, and its likely outcome. If that was where my interest lay, she said, who better to discuss the matter with than Chango himself—surely the final authority on all such matters—who spoke through her mouth at séances held at the temple every Saturday night? Unfortunately this was a Monday, and when I asked Tia Margarita for an off-the-cuff opinion as to the way things up in the Sierra were likely to go, she was oracular and obscure. ‘Chango says victory will come to whom victory is due,’ she said. Still, something came out of the interview, because Tia Margarita went into a kind of mini-trance, lasting perhaps ten seconds, then said that the war would be over in a year—which, give or take a few days, it was.
Even in the short time I was in Santiago, warlike activity took place. From the roof of the hotel in Cespedes Square the night sparkled distantly where Castro partisans had gone into the cane-fields to plant candles, their bases wrapped in paraffin-soaked rags. There was gun-play every night, usually when revolutionaries took on the police, but on one occasion when Castro’s 26th July Movement and the communists decided on a shoot-out. By custom, the first shots were fired precisely at 10 pm, giving the citizens the chance of a quiet stroll in the cool of the evening before the bullets began to fly. With a half hour to go, and all the street lights ablaze, the promenaders began to stream out of the square and make for their homes, where they clustered at their doors like gophers ready to bolt for the shelter of their burrows when the shadow of an eagle fell upon them. Then, as the cathedral clock struck ten, all the lights went out, and the streets were cleared for battle.
The agent Vaquero came to the hotel early next morning to confirm that everything was fixed at Manzanillo, which was the nearest point to the Sierra Maestra before the climb into the mountains began. He hoped to be back in Havana in a week or two, he said, and looked forward to meeting me again. I took the bus that stopped at Manzanillo on its way to Havana and after an hour or so the first slopes of the sierra came into sight. This was cattle country, and I watched cowhands riding stirrupless after skittish gambolling cows, their legs dangling almost to the ground. Clouds blown up from the horizon streamed like bubbles across the tin-plate sky. One of the passengers was carrying a sack of pineapples. He chopped four or five of these into chunks which he handed round, and soon juice was running down all the jaws in sight.
Manzanillo, just like Santiago, was full of colour, with yellow and deep blue paint slapped over the houses, and the forest of the sierra showing over the pink roofs of the single-storey buildings. The bus-stop was at a bar called the Cantina of the Parrot, and there was a beautiful macaw in a gilt cage hangi
ng over the door. This was the bar in which my contacts were to wait. One of them was to stroll across and say, ‘Do you happen to have a light?’ The answer to this was, ‘Sorry, I just gave up smoking.’ Instead, when I got down from the bus, three soldiers closed in on me. They were much more polite than I would have expected. A sergeant asked me to open my suitcase and went through it in a civilised and almost apologetic fashion. After a moment of fumbling he pulled out a khaki shirt. This I had bought at Millett’s army surplus shop in Oxford Street only a few days before, having chosen it for its light-weight material and unusually large pockets. It was now clear to me that security had been much tightened up since Matthews had passed this way.
‘This is a military shirt,’ the sergeant said.
‘No, not military,’ I said. I explained to him that it was made of very light material for a hot climate, and he agreed. ‘Here it is hot,’ he said. The trouble was the colour. ‘This colour is only for the military,’ he said. ‘For other people it is not allowed.’ He liked the shirt and did not see why it should not be allowed. The matter would have to be discussed with an officer who was away but would come soon. In the meanwhile he would have to take charge of my baggage, and suggested that I might go and make myself comfortable in the bar.
We had been joined by a sympathetic man who had ridden up on a chocolate-coloured horse. He was a natural onlooker, and whenever I or the sergeant spoke he nodded agreement, and after a moment he fiddled in a saddle-bag and presented us both with a thin, black, twisted cheroot of a kind made locally. We left the sergeant to stand guard over my suitcase and went into the bar where I ordered Hatuey beers and a plateful of beans for my friend, and the man who owned the place who kept up a muttered conversation with himself, shifted the electric fan so that it would blow on the back of my neck. The macaw started to screech and through the door I saw some children poking at it with a stick, and the owner ran out and chased them away.
We sat there for an hour, sipping beer and cuffing away the big blue flies, then the officer drove up in a jeep and the sergeant showed him in. He, too, was polite. He held the shirt up to the light and whistled softly at its quality, and told me how sorry he was to be obliged to confiscate it. He examined my passport and a letter from the Sunday Times and asked me what I was doing in Manzanillo, and I said that I had been interested to see the place. ‘A bus leaves for Havana in a half hour,’ he said. ‘There are no more buses today. The hotel is closed for the emergency. A policeman is travelling with the bus who will see to it that you arrive safely.’
When I boarded the bus half an hour later we shook hands. ‘This is a nice town with a fine church and an interesting old prison. Please visit us again when you can,’ he said.
Back in Havana a call came through from Ian Fleming.
‘How’s it all going?’ he asked.
‘Fairly well,’ I said.
‘Do you think I was justified in my point of view?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘This thing is not going away. It’s going to get a lot bigger.’
‘Have you talked to the writing man?’
‘Not so far,’ I said. ‘Scott takes a poor view of him. He seemed to think there wasn’t much point.’
‘Never mind Scott. Do your best to see him.’
I assured him I would, and Fleming said that he had just read The Old Man and the Sea again and was more convinced than ever that it was a masterpiece. He had the book open by the telephone and read me a favourite passage. I agreed with him that it was superb but could not see that this literary skill had any bearing upon the judgment of a political situation. ‘People say he keeps out of politics these days,’ I said, ‘but I’ll go on trying to have a word with him.’
A letter from Hemingway arrived saying that he had heard from Jonathan and that he would be pleased to see me. It was written in a small neat hand, and there was a certain formality about it that held me at a distance. The next day he sent a car to pick me up, and I was driven to his converted farmhouse, La Vigie, in the hilly outer suburbs of the city. The privacy of this retreat was protected by a high fence over which hardly more than the roof was to be seen. A gate closed the approach road, and this was secured by a heavy chain. When we stopped the driver got out, thrust a huge key into the padlock and let us through. I got out and wandered a short way along an uphill drive to the house, little realising that with each step I came nearer to the threshold of an experience which was to change my outlook on life, not instantly but slowly over a period of time, in a most fundamental way.
I was free of the taciturn chauffeur, the high, forbidding fence, the heavy padlock and chain, and about to enter the presence of a being of a heroic, almost legendary kind, who had reconstructed the literary architecture of the twentieth century, and had justly been given its highest award—the Nobel prize. Not only that, it was Hemingway who had had the courage and the vision to come out in support of the Spanish republican government when it was under attack not only by Spanish rebels but by troops sent to Spain by Mussolini and by Hitler’s Luftwaffe, which first practised on Spanish territory its techniques of mass destruction. He had pleaded with the English who had invented ‘non intervention’ to realise that their turn would be next, and even by that time he was a big enough man for his warnings to be at least listened to, if not followed. Now as I walked up to the door, the driver at my heels, the great moment had come.
The driver pushed open the door and shoved me through into a narrow passage with another door at the end. I tapped on this and a growl came from the other side which I took to be an invitation to enter. I did so and found myself in a bedroom. Hemingway was seated on a bunk bed. He hauled himself to his feet and turned to face me. He was in his pyjamas and I was bewildered by what I saw. Hemingway had remained for ever young in my imagination, boisterous and vigorous—a moving spirit in the never-ending fiesta of life. This was an old man, slow-moving, cumbersome and burdened with flesh. The room was lined with bookshelves, and many bottles were stacked within reach of the bed. He mumbled a belated welcome and went to find the drinks, moving slowly under the great weight of his body. To my great surprise he poured himself a tumbler of neat Dubonnet, half of which he immediately gulped down. Above all it was his expression that shocked, for there was an exhaustion and emptiness in his face: the corners of his mouth were dragged down by what might have been despair, and his eyes gave the impression that he was trying to weep.
Two objectives of this visit were to be kept in mind, the first being Jonathan Cape’s hope for the imminent delivery of the book Hemingway had been reported as working on for several years, but a cautious reference to this subject provoked something close to an outburst of fury. A wasted and watery eye swivelled to focus on me with suspicion. What did I want? What had I come there for? ‘Is this an interview?’ he asked in the coldest possible manner.
Something in this scene reminded me of the riveting episode in For Whom the Bell Tolls featuring Massart, ‘one of France’s great modern revolutionary figures’, now Chief Commissar of the International Brigade, a ‘symbol man’ who cannot be touched, and has come with time to believe only in the reality of betrayals. With infallible discernment Hemingway had described this great old man’s descent into pettiness, and now I was amazed that a writer who had understood how greatness could be pulled down by the wolves of weakness and old age should—as it appeared to me—have been unable to prevent himself from falling into this trap. How grotesque, but how sad, must have been his appearance at the embassy party with Ava Gardner on his arm.
I hastily assured him that it was nothing of the kind, trying to explain that I was no more than a messenger from a very old and devoted friend, his enthusiastic English publisher.
Humble pie produced the reverse of the effect desired, and Hemingway now embarked on a tirade over what he saw as Cape’s parsimonious handling of the publication of The Old Man and The Sea. ‘They didn’t want to spend money on it,’ he said. To make sure the American edition had a good dust-cov
er he had paid for a first-class artist himself, but the English version had been done on the cheap and lost sales as a result. At this point someone rattled at the back door and he lurched towards it with an outcry of irritation to suppress the female twitterings that came through.
Scott’s challenge now came up. ‘Do you know this guy? I hear you’ve been seen around with him. Is he a friend of yours?’
‘I had an introduction from London. I’ve seen him a few times.’
‘He’s been built up as some sort of dead-eye Dick. You think that’s true?’
‘I’ve no way of knowing,’ I said, but I doubt it.’
‘Take a look at this,’ he said. He handed me a copy of a letter he had written to the Havana Post. I read it. He had taken note, he said, of a challenge to a duel made by the paper’s editor, Edward Scott. This he had decided not to take up in the belief that he owed it to his readers not to jeopardise his life by its acceptance.
‘Dignified?’ he asked.
‘Very,’ I said.
‘Give me your frank opinion. What do you feel about this business yourself?’
‘I wholly agree with you. The thing’s absurd. Even if this is Cuba, it’s the twentieth century.’
‘Right,’ he said. He nodded vigorously, smiling for the first time in the course of our meeting. ‘That’s the way it is,’ he said. In view of the macho posturing for which he had become famous, I was astonished that he was prepared to give this publicity to what many of the paper’s readers would see as a loss of nerve and of face.
As there was now nothing more to be done for Jonathan Cape, only Ian Fleming’s interests remained to be served. But before Hemingway’s opinion could be consulted on the chances of Castro’s success his attention was diverted to something about my appearance, until now overlooked. I was dressed in the second of my pair of army surplus shirts, which, worn with grey, seersucker trousers, had aroused no interest in the streets of Havana. ‘Where did that shirt come from?’ he asked. I told him and threw in the story of the small contretemps at Manzanillo, but he was by no means amused.