Ernesto Read online

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  Elsewhere in America, Ernest’s enterprise and generosity were bearing fruit for a Cuban painter in both significant and peculiar ways as Esquire publicity from Hemingway and Dos Passos had led to the acceptance of Gattorno’s paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1936 as well as a lucrative commission the following year. Waiting for Coffee, a mural for the Bacardi Company headquartered in the Empire State Building, solidified his reputation and career. But a goat named El Señor gave Gattorno more publicity than perhaps he’d hoped for. As the story goes, the Cuban painter brought the goat to the Empire State Building to use as a model. While he was distracted working up in the scaffolds, the goat drank some alcohol-based paint thinner, and in its drunkenness, madly chewed through the rope it was attached to, escaped, and disappeared into offices on the thirty-third floor, where it tried to chew the secretaries. When the artist discovered that the disobedient goat was missing, he chased after him in a rage through a labyrinth of desks and office corridors.

  A reporter caught wind of it and printed a story on January 11, 1938, drawing a herd of Bacardi executives and other onlookers, crowding Gattorno at the easel. The painter fumed, remembering his previous invitation to the executives who had not come for him—and who appeared only now…to see a goat? On a whim, he took up another brush to make a sign: NO SPECTATORS ALLOWED. DO NOT WAIT UNTIL ASKED TO LEAVE.60 Hmmph! Take that, imbeciles and El Señor, el goat! Exasperated with the clown show required of an artist in New York City, Gattorno returned to Cuba to visit family and friends.61

  Retrieving Bumby for the summer, Ernest headed west. Pursuing the auteur throughout the summer were photographers as he hunted at the Nordquists’ L Bar T Ranch in Wyoming, drank at the Stork Club in Manhattan, and fished and put in appearances with Mrs. Hemingway in Key West.62 The couple was fighting bitterly and seemed quite unhappy to family and friends.63 Ernest returned from fishing one evening to attend a costume party with Pauline. When he found the door to his studio locked and could not find the missing key, he became cross with his wife, drew a pistol, and shot off the lock. Disheartened, Pauline left for the party without her husband, who later chased her there. When he found her at the party dancing in a hula-girl costume with another man, he punched him and humiliated her by causing a scene.

  Scribner’s would soon be publishing his newest semifictional short stories along with the play recently completed under fire in Madrid. Remembering the general “gang up” of critics against him for his last novel, To Have and Have Not, which he felt was a good novel in several ways, Ernest insisted that the next book be of unquestionable quality, and in a letter to Max Perkins he set the record straight with this disclaimer: “I don’t think it is persecution or mania or egotism if I say that there are a lot of critics who really seem to hate me very much and would like to put me out of business. And don’t think I mean it conceitedly when I say that a lot of it is jealousy; I do what they would like to do, and I do what they are afraid to do; and they hate you for it…Well anyway the hell with it.”64

  At the end of the summer, Ernest returned via Paris with Martha Gellhorn to the war in Spain. After he had departed, Pauline warned in a letter, “I do hope you won’t stay away too long. A husband should not stay away from a loving wife too long.”65 A week later she begged him not to humiliate her: “Don’t forget I am following rigorously my policy of believing what my husband says in his letters. Also, if you want to keep a contented wife, see to it that she does not hear from strangers where her husband is and with whom.”66 Feeling isolated in Key West without him, she leased an apartment in Midtown Manhattan where she stayed with their son Patrick and could visit family and friends also in the Big Apple.

  In Catalonia, Ernest and Martha watched as a fascist army conquered the hearts and bodies of young men, Loyalists who fought to defend the country in vain. Tyranny was winning. When Juan Negrín disbanded the International Brigades in October, Ernest wept—Martha would write in her memoirs that it was the only time she had ever seen him cry.67

  By the end of the month, Scribner’s published the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, in which the play appeared. The play depicted the espionage activities of a larger-than-life foreign correspondent, a protagonist resembling Hemingway in civil-war Spain. Ever since he had been a boy in Oak Park, Ernest Hemingway had had a lion-sized imagination captivated by the lives of soldiers, spies, and other adventurers. In World War I, in the Spanish Civil War, in the Caribbean as the captain of his own fishing boat, and later, in France, Belgium, and Germany during World War II, he had romped and frolicked, pretending to be a soldier and a spy, while he was an ambulance driver and a journalist, implicating greater involvement and sporadically crossing the line, but the book drew unfavorable fire from reviewers who regarded the play as an immature, outlandish, and overly sentimental piece, full of fantasy and wartime propaganda.68

  While walking along a Manhattan avenue, Pauline noted the absence of his new book on Scribner’s shelves, so she wrote her errant mate to scold him for his lack of attention to his business: “Perhaps my dear fellow you should be shifting from your mistress—shall we call her War—to your master.”69

  Driven by a fellow reporter and chum-from-the-trenches, Herbert Matthews, across the northeastern boarder to Perpignan, Ernest returned home in November via Paris and New York to winter in Key West with Pauline and his sons. Martha stayed in Barcelona with their friend and fellow journalist Robert Capa to follow the Loyalists’ debacle to its ugly end. After a decisive Loyalist defeat in November at the Battle for Ebro, Nationalists forced a Loyalist retreat. Nationalists now outnumbered Loyalists six soldiers to one. When the fascists struck at the heart of Catalonia, bombarding Barcelona and seizing the city at the end of January, defeat became inevitable.

  Out of sorts after Spain and no longer happy with his wife in Key West, Ernest returned to New York just after New Year’s in 1939 to see Bumby, on holiday from private school, and to attend the theatrical opening of The Spanish Earth with Martha and his eldest son. No longer trying to hide the affair, father, son, and girlfriend dined at the trendy Stork Club. Ernest’s fifteen-year-old marveled as he beheld the tall, attractive blonde hanging on his father’s arm and her husky voice, irresistible while slinging swear words with greater facility than any woman he had ever seen.70

  Later that year Martha would write to one of her oldest friends, H. G. Wells, to complain of “shabby” Paris and confess her longing to leave the toil of journalism and pursue leisure and writing prospects on a distant beach, which suggested that the conspiracy between “Bug” (Ernest) and “Mook” (Martha) had already begun: “I’ve written my article on England (just whacking it out, and in such a hurry to be free) and shall soon be going somewhere to swim and sunburn and try to write a book. I won’t move or earn money for at least six months, anyhow I hope so.”71

  One of Hemingway’s lesser-known stories from that time, “Nobody Ever Dies,” is among his first to be set in Cuba, in Jaimanitas, where Grant and Jane Mason lived.72 Using details from Santería (an Afro-Cuban religion combining elements of Catholicism and Yoruba) and typical scenes like a porch with a caged bird in a swing, the author began to explore Creole culture while combining it with wartime events he had reported on and experienced firsthand. Though this story is somewhat marred by propagandist overtones, it depicts a Loyalist solider, Enrique, who after fighting in the Spanish Civil War flees to the isle where he is killed by reactionaries in the government, tipped off just hours after his arrival. When a policeman guns Enrique down, a heroine, Maria, explains that dying for a cause is impossible, since, uniting with all those who fight for justice, one becomes eternal, lives forever.

  In February, New Masses published “On the American Dead in Spain,” Ernest’s tribute to the fallen, evoking lines from The Sun Also Rises and his short story “A Natural History of the Dead”: in it, he wrote, the winter was blowing through the olive trees of Spain, but wh
en winter became spring, the dead would remain in the Spanish earth—and the fallen American soldiers of the Lincoln Brigade would be immortal. While tyranny in Spain would one day end, the earth would endure forever.73 Flying out of New York City during a snowstorm, Ernest returned to Key West to find Gus and Louise Pfeiffer on a brief visit to check on the fragile marriage of their favorite niece. Soon after, the Hemingways received Ernest’s mother, Grace, who spent a strained six-day visit (at her son’s insistence) at the Key West hotel Casa Marina before driving back to Oak Park. It was the last time she would see her son.

  Vacationing with her mother in Naples, Florida, Martha Gellhorn waited within striking distance. Making a place for herself in Ernest’s life, as perhaps the only woman who would stand up to him, their relationship was now as vital as it would become volatile.74

  CHAPTER 6

  Hemingway’s Cuban Family (1939–1941)

  The day after Valentine’s Day, Ernest boarded his fishing boat and fled from his second failing marriage and his Key West home. He sought refuge, as he often had, on Cuba.1 This may have been a more or less conscientious attempt to spare his wife from public humiliation, or he might not have yet been entirely at ease with his increasingly public affair.

  In a letter to the First Lady, Martha, whose spirits were trodden by the destruction she had recently witnessed in Spain, reaffirmed her intentions to get away from everyone: “Everything that has happened these last six weeks has been so heartbreaking that I cannot endure to think about it.”2 A week before going abroad, Ernest wrote Perkins that he thought he was going to Cuba “to work,” so he took inventory of the stories he had written and wanted to write, mentioning one begun in Madrid about an American in the International Brigades soldiering for the beloved Spanish Republic, and another about

  the old commercial fisherman who fought the swordfish all alone in his skiff for 4 days and four nights and the sharks finally eating it after he had it alongside and could not get it into the boat. That’s a wonderful story of the Cuban coast. I’m going out with old Carlos in his skiff so as to get it all right. Everything he does and everything he thinks in all that long fight with the boat out of sight of all the other boats all alone on the sea. It’s a great story if I can get it right.3

  Though he promised to put it in the forthcoming collection, the story of the Cuban fisherman would not materialize in time.

  On Paseo del Prado with Martha at his side and at a desk of a hotel room in Havana, he poured himself into a novel begun as a short story in Madrid—discovering a new happiness. If he were to break from Pauline (and the Pfeiffer family), he would need the money that a new book could bring.4 It had to be good. Keeping his corner room at the Ambos Mundos, Ernest moved in with Martha at the Sevilla-Biltmore Hotel and had his mail forwarded to that address. In a letter, he let a friend in on the trick: “Tell everyone you live in one hotel and live in another. When they locate you, move to the country. When they locate you in the country move somewhere else. Work everyday till you’re so pooped about all the exercise you can face is reading the papers. Then eat, play tennis or swim or something in a work daze just to keep your bowells moveing and (sic) the next day write again.”5 Two rooms offered autonomy as well as anonymity, an escape route sometimes unavailable in Key West, and solitude when it was desired in service of his work.

  Enamored with baseball and many other things American, hailed among tourists as the Riviera of the Western Hemisphere, and praised by speculators as the “new California,” Havana was a thriving and attractive capital in those days, an inebriating cocktail of Old World charm and New World promise. It was an innovative city whose planners had conspired with governors and investors to commission impressive public works projects like waterways, intercity ferries, highways, and the Capitolio dome.6

  In the central Vedado neighborhood, Art Deco apartment buildings that housed international executives in their upper decks flaunted modern and impertinent architecture, which reached in gleaming style for the radiant skies. In the streets of a historic center, a few blocks from the magnificence of the roaring sea, sun-bronzed beauties strolled beneath white silk parasols, dark hair bouncing behind them, as they passed beside high columns, fanned themselves with Spanish abanicos, and gazed back across their shoulders with interminable brown eyes.7 The ladies unaccompanied, a man might pursue them beneath the shade of the arched walkways that lined Paseo del Prado, across the grandiose open expanses of the sprawling avenue, and as they ducked into the corners of a more intimate maze of twisting back alleyways.

  Street musicians filled those cobbled corridors with song and rumba—rising from fleshy throats bewitchingly, strumming from interiors of guitars vibrantly, intermingling with beats primitive and profound from conga drums, rasping delicate scratches of guiros, and shakes of shekeres, and maracas, keeping rhythm amidst the soft humming resonance of a saxophone, awakened by strident wails of trumpets and murmured garbles of trombones, and in low and hallow warbles of muffled tubas from a sonata of improvisation floating though expiring summers, and calming lovers as they sailed along El Malecón, the seawall, watching the crashing waves and immersing themselves in the milk of moonlight. And so, riding the waves of a rare economic boom, of foreign investments at last arriving to bolster her hopes with fruit, sugar, and tobacco trades, Havana blossomed and offered refuge, opportunities, and romance, to exiles, entrepreneurs, and artists, flocking to her shores from Asia, Europe, and North America in need of work, in search of fortune, in obstinate pursuit of paradise.

  Among them were many refugees from the Spanish Civil War—including Ernest and Martha in their own way—who treated the writer with great respect and soon became members of his clan. During the war in Spain, these men had been comrades, and in Cuba, they became friends, fishing and drinking, full of raucous laughter, nostalgia, anguish, and a necessity to forget in the blue depths and tawny sunsets of the Caribbean island. Fleeing execution in Iberia, the exiles’ revolutionary dreams found new expression on this tropical island in the Americas.

  Entranced by his writing and his new social milieu, Ernest was much too busy to attend to finding a permanent house. Routinely excluded from fishing, drinking, or jai alai matches, Gellhorn’s irritation with the irregularity and illegitimacy of their situation grew. Taking matters into her own hands, she scoured Havana’s classifieds for more suitable quarters. When she stumbled upon an advertisement for a fifteen-acre property located high in Havana’s foothills, called Finca Vigía, or “Lookout Farm,” for its privileged view of the Cuban capital below, she interrupted his breakfast by slapping the folded newspaper with the ad circled in red across the table. His assignment was clear.

  Hemingway took the newspaper gently from her hands. Stretching a pleasant grin across his face, he promised his lover that he would visit the property that very afternoon, just as soon as the day’s writing was done. To investigate the house twenty kilometers to the north in the barrio of San Francisco de Paula, Ernest commandeered a taxi from Parque Central and then passing through the zones along the outskirts of Havana would witness a squalor that he had never seen.8 Arriving at the Finca, Ernest found its front gate closed. He thought some neighborhood children playing out front might help him shimmy the lock.

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  One of most significant relationships Ernest would develop with a Cuban was with a ten-year-old boy named René Villarreal (two years older than his youngest son, Gregory, and one year younger than his middle child, Patrick), whom he met that morning in front of the place that would soon become his home. On that day in January 1939, Hemingway was thirty-nine years old. René, his brothers, and the other neighborhood children were playing baseball in front of the Finca Vigía when an injured aura (a vulture common in Havana) fell from the sky and sought refuge behind the Finca’s front gate. The boys had stopped playing to surround and tease the bird when two men in a long dark sedan pulled up. “¡Muchachos! What are you doing with that bird?” asked one of the men
in American-accented Spanish.9

  They replied that they were playing, but the men asked the children to leave the bird alone, and they respected his request. According to René’s recollection, “El Americano” was a tall, strong man in shorts, leather sandals, long hair, and a thick moustache. They were impressed with him, as not many people could afford cars at that time, and even fewer of such people came to their village.

  The men tried the gate a few times before calling the boys back over. El Americano asked if this was the property of Mr. Roger Joseph D’Orn Duchamp de Castaigne, a Frenchman. They replied that it was, and he asked them if they knew how to open the gate. Indeed, the boys had a trick for getting in, and when they showed him, the writer, grinning, gave them each a dollar bill. The boys applauded with joy and thanked the bulky American man. In a day’s hard labor, their fathers could not have earned as much.

  In polite conversation, Hemingway asked the boys what they had been doing before he came. They had been playing baseball! Kneeling to address them at eye level, he asked them what sort of equipment they used. They showed him a ball made from dingy rags and an old broomstick for a bat and explained that they played “a manos limpias,” or barehanded. They liked to play baseball in the open fields of the Finca and pick fruit from its many trees, but the owner, D’Orn, did not like them to do so and would send his mean-spirited gardener to chase them off.

  If he bought the property, said Ernest to the children, they could play there any time they liked, and he would love for them to meet his sons who were about their age. The children watched the Cuban chauffeur drive the automobile down the dusty gravel driveway and the americano disappear into the big house at the top of the hill. After offering de l’eau fraiche avec du citron in the salon, the D’Orns relayed the history of Finca Vigía, a hilltop where the Spanish army had maintained a wooden fort during the nineteenth century commanding a privileged view of Havana; the name “vigía” came from vigilar, meaning to “keep watch.”10