Ernesto Read online

  A tugboat appeared to pull the large ship through the ramparts on either side of the canal.16 In the old days they ran a chain between the fortresses on either side of the water to block the entrance of raiding ships. That day, atop the aging parapets, stood modern sentinels in white sailors’ uniforms armed with wooden-stock rifles, slung loosely about their shoulders with green webbed straps. People strolling along the seawall gathered in the park along the water’s edge to watch the grand entrance of the great ship. As RMS Orita neared the massive cement slab, sailors tossed her lines over the edges of the tall hull. The docksmen below recovered the lines and attached them to bollards. A whistle shattered weeks of vast ocean silence. Then the boat buzzed with activity as passengers prepared for debarkation.

  Ducking through the hatch, Ernest stepped aside as passengers departed with large suitcases. Opening the door of his cabin, he found Pauline sitting inside, pinning her hair in front of the vanity, with her fine reflection looking back as he came in. Rising to greet her prize, a writer as clever as he was determined, she pulled herself tightly into the alcoves of his thick body.

  Had he had a marvelous time outside? How was she feeling? Had she been able to sleep? And the movements of “Petit Pilar”…? “Pilar,” the code name that they had used while she was his mistress had now become the nickname for the daughter that they hoped she would deliver.17 Glancing at Pauline’s swelling belly, he wondered if it was a girl as she predicted. Excitedly describing his views of the port, he put on the brown suit that she had laid out for him, then sat on the bed behind her and watched as she finished painting her lashes and lips. Her hair was “clipped close like a boy’s” and “coarsely silky,” accentuating the nape of her neck, just like later descriptions of several of his fictional heroines.18

  As Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway exited the passageway into a humid spring evening, they longed for a bath and a night’s sleep on solid land to sustain them during the last leg of a long journey across the Straits of Florida toward home.19 Along with seven packets of mail, Ernest and Pauline were thus delivered to Havana.20

  Nearly twenty-nine years old and soon to be the father of two, Ernest stood six feet tall with a mustache accentuating his adulthood and his authority. Pauline was four years older, but five inches shorter, and smaller, making her look much younger than he. She wore a dark floral scarf and a draping silk dress hung like a cloak over her emergent abdomen. A felt cloche hat extended over sharp, acquiescent eyes; a friend once described her as “very winning, very bright. Her face was not beautiful, but so intelligent and alert that she became attractive.”21

  In front of the terminal was a bustling street where clucking horse carriages competed with tooting Model T roadsters, and motorbikes squawked alongside porters dragging wheelbarrows stacked with suitcases and heavy trunks. On the other side of the melee was a high hedge and, beyond that, Saint Francis Square, or Plaza de San Francisco, commonly known by Habaneros as the Plaza de las Palomas with the Fuente de los Leones as its centerpiece, which a flock of pigeons had claimed as baignoire for their exclusive use.22 From the mouths of its four kneeling lions, four streams of water were trickling serenely toward the four corners of the square. As the Hemingways passed through, eighteen iron bells in the towers of the church rang out, shaking the plaza and sending the pigeons into flight. Every hour it occurred: the birds took center stage with demonstrations of aerobatics for passers by before settling back into their bath and returning tranquility to the square with their coocoorrucoos.

  Exiting the plaza to cross Oficios, Amagura, Obrapía, and Mercaderes Streets, Ernest and Pauline followed other arrivals, blending in with locals and expatriates that composed Habana Vieja—Old Havana—at the time. On Calle Obispo (Bishop Street), they came face-to-face with the newly constructed five-story Hotel Ambos Mundos, “the best of both worlds,” where their room awaited.23 As they approached, a fine looking white-uniformed mulatto doorman greeted them grandly in the foyer and escorted them through the lobby to reception. Marble-tiled floors, high ceilings, chaise longes, fresh flowers, interior fountains, and a polished bar—all contributed to the hotel’s Art Deco elegance.

  They received a room key and took the elevator to the highest floor. In the corner room, 511, there was a large mahogany bed, a nightstand with a chrome water pitcher, a dresser, a bookshelf, and a writing desk. The porter opened the double windows to let the air flow into the room and showed them how to close the shutters during storms and how to draw the curtains to shield themselves from the sun. Having tipped the porter, Ernest stepped out on the fifth-floor balcony to discover a privileged view of the harbor below. After they had bathed, they lay beside each other on the creaking mattress, settling into the clean dryness of their sheets and the wonderful dark stillness of the room. Having spent more than a month at sea, they listened to the muffled screeches of wind outside, across waves, and beyond, and soon both vanished into dreamless sleep.

  In the morning Ernest sat at the desk to write letters while his wife continued to sleep. After his third letter, he stood, approached the window, and watched the silence. “To the north, over the old cathedral, the entrance to the harbor, and the sea, and to the east to Casablanca peninsula, the roofs of all houses in between and the width of the harbor.”24 Abandoning correspondence, he moved his chair next to the balcony. In the distance, he could make out dozens of small fishing boats like those they had passed coming in. Peering out toward the boats as they rowed over the waves he remembered that he had already seen them—untroubled amidst sharks, leaning back against their skiffs, rising and falling over waters turning every shade of blue.

  He had seen them in paintings with his first wife years ago during the first week they had spent together. And they had loved each other very much. It was just after the War when his mother had kicked him out of the house and he had moved in with his friends—fellow ambulance driver Bill Horne, and Bill and Katy Smith from Walloon Lake—with whom he had shared a Chicago flophouse.25 Now memories of Winslow Homer’s watercolors from a visit to the Chicago Art Institute returned.26

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  After an ordeal of caring for her dying mother, Hadley Richardson had come to Chicago in October 1920 to recover with Katy Smith, her friend and roommate from Bryn Mawr, but Katy saw less and less of her friend after Hadley and Ernest met and sparked a romance that continued through tender letters long after Hadley’s return to Saint Louis. A redhead with hints of gold, Hadley had lovely hands and a beautiful heart.27 She emanated clarity and empathy, wholesome sexiness and generosity. When she came into the room, an intense feeling overcame him: he had met the girl he was going to marry.28

  A “beautiful physical specimen,” Ernest was eight years younger than she; he was “slender and moved well. His face had the symmetry of fine bony structure and he had a small elastic mouth that stretched from ear to ear when he laughed. He laughed aloud a lot from quick humor and from sheer joy of being alive.”29 He had been aptly named, for what charmed her more than anything was his “flattering habit” of listening to her, “focusing his entire attention on a person, gazing out from watchful brown eyes,” suggesting that he was sincere and “not interested in anyone but her.”30

  The spark between them resulted in visits back and forth between Saint Louis and Chicago, but it was through letters that they created the sort of intimacy that might have made them blush had they been face-to-face: “I must not…hold back from you. It would poison me,” she wrote.31 In ever more affectionate letters, they gave each other nicknames, like “Nesto” and “Hasovitch,” invented a language, and solidified an alliance.32 While separated, the letters expressed erotic imaginings, passionate longings, and sexual awakenings: “Your hands can make me do all sorts of nice things for you by the littlest touch—make me want to, I mean, but then, so can your eyes. I’d do anything your eyes said.”33 It was difficult, she said, to put the letters containing so much of herself into the mailbox and let them go.34

  When
he struggled in Chicago to earn forty dollars per week at the magazine Cooperative Commonwealth, she reassured him, “We are PARTNERS…if I hadn’t been aware of my ability to back my single self financially…I wouldn’t have let you, ever take me on,” and when Sherwood Anderson prodded him with the knowledge that the place for any aspiring writer was Paris, Hadley let it be known that her inheritance assured them financial independence.35 Marrying on Horton’s Bay, Michigan, in September 1921, they honeymooned at the family cabin before moving into a dingy flat at 1239 North Dearborn Street.

  Supporting him heart and soul, she believed in Ernest and his writing: “I never expected to find anyone into whose life I could fling my spirit—and now I can—every side of me backs you up…I love your ambitions. Don’t think I am ambitious except to be a balanced, happy, intelligent lady, making the man happy and using everything lovely he has to give me, very hard.”36 In November, just after he had lost the job at Cooperative Commonwealth and secured another with the Toronto Star’s Parisian office, they booked passage aboard SS Leopoldina, bound for Paris.

  During the early days, they had lived in the Latin Quarter at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine in an apartment with no running water and a bucket for a lavatory on the landing of the stairs. When they returned to Paris after the birth of their first son in Toronto, they lived at 113 rue Notre-Dame des Champs just above a sawmill in a working-class neighborhood near Montparnasse.37 They called their boy “Bumby” because of the “round, solid feel of him” in their arms, but his Christian name was John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, after his mother and a bullfighter they admired.38

  Hadley had been Hemingway’s closest friend and the loveliest and most sincere person that he had ever known.39 From the middle of the Atlantic Ocean during his transatlantic crossing, he had calculated the time in Paris and wondered if Bumby and Hadley might have been still sleeping in their beds, or if they might have been awakening at that moment, or brushing their teeth, or if they were in the kitchen having café avec tartines de beurre et marmelade.40 From the bridge of the steamship, he had even sent her a telegram: “FAREWELL.”41

  Now through the translucent curtains of his hotel in Cuba, he watched Pauline, his second wife. When he first met her at the Fitzgeralds’, he had not thought much of her, preferring her sister, Virginia, as the more attractive of the two.42 He remembered that he and Hadley had just met Zelda and Scott, read Scott’s new novel The Great Gatsby, and agreed it was very good.43 Scott took it upon himself to mentor Ernest and introduce him and Hadley to their wealthy friends, such as Gerald and Sara Murphy with whom they had become enamored and summered in Antibes.44 Weary of poverty and eager for a publisher to give real publicity to his work, Ernest accepted Scott’s help.

  Petite and flat chested, Pauline attended a private Catholic school in Saint Louis before coming to Paris to work for Vogue. Dressing the part in long strings of pearls and short-fringed dresses, she looked as if she had stepped out of the pages of the magazine. Seeing Ernest occasionally at the Dingo Bar while he was having a drink with Scott or with John Dos Passos, the Pfeiffer sisters threw around the latest slang (everything was “positively ambrosial,” the superlative of the moment), smoked cigarettes from ivory stems, and flirted openly with the boys.45 Scott said the rumor was Pauline had come to Paris to shop for a husband; the sisters’ clothes and manners announced just how much money their family possessed.46

  The trouble started one afternoon just after Ernest and Hadley had returned from skiing in Schruns, and Hadley received an invitation for tea at Kitty Cannell’s apartment near the Eiffel Tower. There was an American girl from Saint Louis who, Kitty said, had recently arrived in Paris whom Hadley had to meet, because she was from Saint Louis, too. When Hadley, aged thirty-four, arrived looking matronly and plain, she found the Pfeiffer sisters slender with delicate bones like small birds, exquisitely dressed, and with silky bobbed black hair like Japanese dolls.47

  Pauline wore a trendy chipmunk coat, one of its kind.48 After boxing, Ernest and Harold Loeb turned up, faces flushed with virility and vitality, and Ernest ended up chatting with Virginia, mostly about their hometown and the family fortune, and showing much more than polite interest.49 Ernest later joked to Kitty that he would have gladly taken Virginia in her sister’s coat.50

  Hearing Hadley and Ernest had a son, the Pfeiffers dropped in on the Hemingways’ meager apartment one day for a visit with an expensive toy from a store on rue Saint-Honoré. Doting on Hadley also, they brought fashion magazines, invited her to shows, and took her to tea at the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde. Even though Pauline initially protested such a pig of a man, shabby and unshaven, could allow his wife to live in such abject conditions, soon the witty, well-to-do sisters were dropping by the room Ernest rented as an office on the fifth floor of the rue Mouffetard, bringing their good cheer, lively talk, and admiring eyes to the end of long days spent in front of an uncooperative typewriter.51 Afterward, appearing only was Pauline, well dressed, clever, flattering, offering to take him, a married man, to dinner.52

  Owning the corn, the wheat, most of the land, the bank, and the cotton gin in Piggott, Pauline’s father was very wealthy, and her uncle Gus, who was even wealthier (with investments in drug stores, pharmaceuticals, liniment, and perfume) and who had no children of his own, made doubly certain that Pauline never wanted for anything.53 She was a rich girl who was accustomed to getting exactly what she desired, and when she realized that she wanted Ernest, she set out to take him, regardless of whether he was already married to Hadley and to Bumby.54 In the end, he accepted the deal.

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  From the balcony of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, he watched Pauline sleeping, exhausted, on the big bed and looked out at the boats fishing in front of the castle, and he decided to take a walk and let “Fife” rest. At the bar, he ordered a coffee, and a barman in a white jacket brought it out. Reinvigorated, he walked outside, then following the street passing in front of their hotel, he drifted toward the city center with the vague intention of hiring a car so they could see some of the town when his wife woke up.55

  Without restrictions and following the current, he wandered up the main commercial thoroughfare of Calle Obispo where fabric traders, printers, booksellers, tailors, spice vendors, restaurateurs, and tavern keepers attracted an unending river of pedestrian traffic. There, he saw merchants, veiled matrons, well-tailored businessmen, Creoles in white garments, mothers and daughters eyeing merchandise and being watched by others in their long, flowing dresses amidst shoeshine boys, priests, tourists, beggars, speculators, and fortune seekers. After a long gray Parisian winter and a rough crossing, the streets of Havana offered firm soil, sunshine, and a reassuring breeze.

  A vanguard in the Americas, the Creole capital of Havana had already achieved notoriety by 1928. Fueled by depressed economies at home and the proliferation of advertisements promising easier fortunes, Europeans, Asians, and North Americans flocked at the turn of the century in greater and greater numbers to the island in pursuit of amusement, adventure, and opportunity. Havana, which writers described as a feminine and alluring city that gave herself freely and held nothing back from those who would venture to her shores, had become a refuge for these émigrés, though hundreds of thousands incoming would also be cut down by illness and disease or robbed by the unlawful schemes of financial predators proliferating in Havana at that time.

  As he came upon Parque Central (Central Park), he observed businessmen sitting on rows of benches beneath the trees and boys kneeling on the pavement in front of them to shine their shoes. Two eras of taxistas lined up: horse buggies and automobiles.56 On a pedestal in the center of the park stood a high statue of a short man, José Martí.57 Tucking his left arm meekly behind his back, the white-marble likeness with a thick mustache, taut bow tie, and flowing overcoat pointed his right finger ahead.

  As he crossed the park, Ernest looked up into Martí’s white granite eyes—fixed firmly ahead—incar
nating all he had accomplished and all he had not. An activist for liberty as a boy, Martí was accused of treason at the age of sixteen, imprisoned by the Spanish government, and exiled from Cuba. Living in Spain, in Mexico and Guatemala, in the United States and Venezuela, Martí studied, became a lawyer, organized a movement, and returned with an army to reclaim his homeland. As the forefather of a Cuban democracy, Martí united disparate peoples—Creoles and former slaves—as they took a stand after years of servitude for freedom.58 As a poet, he wrote movingly with a mighty pen. As a general, he participated stubbornly with a feeble sword during the first battle of the Cuban War of Independence at Dos Ríos. Despite his diminutive stature, Martí became his country’s most beloved hero by living and dying for his cause four years before Ernest Hemingway was born.

  Ernest looked down El Malecón, a wall weaving lazily along the waves crashing across the rocks at its base, then gazed into “the mirror of the sea,” waters that Conrad, an author he admired,59 had said had no memory.60 The balustrade, running the length of the sidewalk between the city and the sea, from Vedado to El Morro fort, were reminiscent of many he had seen on the Riviera and on Spanish coasts. To have no memory sounded wonderful as in his mind the entanglements of his past turned over.61

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  As winter approached in December 1925, Ernest, Hadley, and Bumby took refuge from the gray dankness of Paris, skiing in the white powdered mountains of Schruns, Austria. On Christmas eve, Pauline arrived too, by now the maidenly friend of the family, and checked into a neighboring room of the Hotel Taube.62 It was the oldest trick probably that there was, wrote Ernest later, for a rich young unmarried woman to become the temporary best friend of the wife, then stealthily, innocently, and unrelentingly set out to marry her husband.63 Every morning in the Austrian chalet, the writer wrote as was his routine, and in the afternoons while he and Hadley were skiing, the rich, unmarried woman who had joined them sat reading by the fire.