Ernesto Read online

  Cuban researcher Osmar Mariño Rodríguez interviewed Campoamor on several occasions between 1993 and Campoamor’s death in 2001. During one interview, Campoamor took out a picture from his personal collection, where Hemingway appeared with Leopoldina, and remembered attending a baseball game with Hemingway at the Tropical between Almendares and Havana. Afterward they went to Floridita and to the Donoban to see a few friends. Sometimes they visited the avenue along the port and the adjoining neighborhoods where the writer liked to mix with common people. “We always had a hell of a good time on these outings,” said Campoamor. “We went to see cockfights, to the Montmartre Casino, to Sloppy Joe’s, to the Plaza Hotel, to the Sevilla Hotel, to the Sans Souci Casino, and other places around town.”42

  Hemingway’s friend and a Floridita regular, Fernando Campoamor, and bartender, Antonio Meilán, both describe Leopoldina as poor, a “prostitute through need,” whom Ernest would often invite either to accompany him on the town or back to his home. Apparently, he also gave her gifts, for “sentimental reasons.” In an interview with Russian biographer Yuri Páporov, Serpa affirms that Leopoldina was “one of the easy, attractive luxury women in Havana” at the end of the 1930s and 1940s, who suddenly lacked the means of earning a living another way. Serpa acknowledges that in order to support herself and her son, she was known to accept money from the rich and powerful men of Havana who frequented the Floridita. But he also underlines that it would have been difficult to find another woman with “such a pure and tender spirit as Leopoldina.”43 Hemingway and Leopoldina were kindred spirits, Serpa emphasizes, who had both been unlucky in love, found each other, and formed a pact that gave them reciprocal comfort, affection, and loyalty. It would be misleading to reduce their lasting friendship to a business transaction: “Leopoldina could never attain happiness, but more than with any other, with Hemingway she had known friendship, a comforting, tender, and attentive, and often paternal relationship. She was the only woman allowed to enter the Floridita without an escort, and this small privilege she owed to her friendship with Hemingway.”44

  Ilse Bulit, who lived with her aunt Leopoldina in an apartment that Hemingway rented for them in the 1940s and 1950s, confirms the duration and depth of their relationship, documenting its similarity to the one described in Islands in the Stream. In a series of articles she published in the Cuban press and in my own recent interview with her, Bulit describes her memories of this relationship in vivid detail. She reports that Hemingway visited her aunt regularly, gave Leo a regular allowance, and for more than a decade paid the rent of her apartment in the Astral building on Old Havana’s Calle Infanta. Born in 1941, Bulit remembers Hemingway’s constant presence during her childhood: “Leopoldina, a fine-featured, dark-skinned young lady, became Hemingway’s lover for many years. The truth is that he never left her for another woman. Hemingway loved Leopoldina, held her very dear to his heart. He paid for her apartment on Calle Infanta and never abandoned her.”

  Of course, Leopoldina Rodríguez was not simply a Floridita barfly nor Hemingway’s would-be mistress, but a complex woman with her own history, experiences, and desires. Her mother was a maid to a powerful and prosperous Havana family, the Pedrosos, who lived near the Plaza de la Catedral, so Leopoldina enjoyed an education unavailable for most Cubans at that time. Bulit affirms, “Like my grandmother María Ignacia, she knew how to use the cutlery, serve wine for meat or fish, and carry some books on the head at home to show good posture in public.” Throughout her life, these advantages were useful to Leopoldina in attracting cultured, financially secure men of influence. Hemingway was but one of these men.

  As a young woman in Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century, Leopoldina resourcefully attempted to build a life for herself using the means available to her. At that time, one opportunity for a mixed-race woman graced with beauty was to “try her luck” with a wealthy man of good standing, preferably a Spaniard or a Chinaman. As fate would have it, she became involved with a Cuban of Spanish descent, Alberto Baraqué, who would father her only son, Alberto, Jr. But perhaps because of her race, Leopoldina’s lover never legitimized their relationship with a marriage proposal. He did, however, invite her to accompany him to Europe.45 Although Alberto and Leopoldina had their differences and separated there, Leopoldina did not yet retreat to her native land. Instead, she became the mistress to the famed Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera, executed by Franco in 1936 as a traitor to the Spanish Republic. José Antonio provided Leopoldina with the means to return to Havana and open her own dress boutique in the center of town, although this business, attempted during the tough economic times of the Great Depression, would later fail. In this context Leopoldina began to frequent the Floridita.

  Much like Martha Gellhorn, “Leopoldina la Honesta” was not afraid to tell Ernest what she thought. In addition, they offered each other company and friendship during some of the most difficult days of their later years. They taught each other about the cultures of their origins. They became close friends. They looked after and cared for each other in ways that others did not. Ernest, in his middle age—suffering from writer’s block and depression, not seeing eye to eye with his wives—frequented the Floridita, drinking heavily, became Leopoldina’s loyal confidant, and gained her perspective.

  Leopoldina appears to have influenced the writer’s religious practices as well as helped him to understand and appreciate Santería, popular folklore, and other elements of Cuban culture. Campoamor confirms, “Hemingway made himself a part of that world easily enough. Leopoldina and others led him to it. Or perhaps it was a natural affinity since those humble, simple people shared a world of illusions and hopes with Hemingway.” He routinely visited the Port, Regla, and Guanabacoa [located between the Finca Vigía and Cojímar], and the Church of Regla, the temple of Yemayá, the goddess of the sea, who is known popularly in Cuba as the “Virgen de Regla.”46 For sailors, the Virgin is a savior who guards their ships after she miraculously appeared on September 8, 1696. Campoamor remembered also that with Hemingway, Leopoldina, and Serpa, he visited El Rincón, where one finds the image of Saint Lazarus.

  The long conversations at the Floridita with Leopoldina concerning Santería, like those that occur with Lil in Islands in the Stream, might certainly have helped Hemingway to acquire a multicultural view of Afro-Cuban religious practices. In Islands, Lil, like her real-life counterpart Leopoldina, has “absolutely blind faith” in the Afro-Cuban religion, and in the Saint of Mariners, La Virgen de Regla, as well as Our Lady of Charity, the Virgen del Cobre. Thomas Hudson admires this faith and tells Lil that she “must keep it.” In response, Lil reassures Hudson that the Virgin del Cobre is “looking after” his son Tom “day and night.”

  In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago respectfully keeps his late wife’s pictures of the sacred heart of Jesus and the Virgen del Cobre. He also promises to “say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys” and “make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre,” a typical Cuban tradition, if he catches his fish, a promise foreshadowing the writer’s own donation of his Nobel Prize medal to the Virgen del Cobre.

  Although one must not confuse fiction with reality, the colorful descriptions in Islands might provide scholars with a rare window to the past, an illustration of Leopoldina as seen directly from Hemingway’s perspective: “There was this lovely face looking down the bar at him, lovelier all the time as he came closer. Then he was beside her and there was the big body and the rose color was artificial now and there was no mystery about any of it, although it was still a lovely face.” When Hudson assures Honest Lil that she looks beautiful, she blushes. “Oh, Tom, I am so big now. I am ashamed.” He puts his hand on her great haunches and says, “You’re a nice big.” She confesses her shame at walking down the bar, but Tom insists, “You do it beautifully. Like a ship.” Honest Lil inquires, “How is our friend?” to which Tom reports, “He’s fine.” When will she be able to see him? Lil asks. Tom exclaims, “Any time. Now?” In this familiar scene at the
Floridita, Hudson and Lil seem to be on intimate terms, in a sexual friendship that very probably resembles Hemingway’s relationship with Leopoldina. Hemingway underlines their familiarity and intimacy with comedy; the mutual friend to whom they jokingly refer is none other than the protagonist’s penis.

  Written at a time when Hemingway was struggling with separation from his three sons and the failure of three consecutive marriages, Islands in the Stream dramatizes its author’s sense of isolation and loss. Protagonist Thomas Hudson, having experienced the tragic deaths of all three of his sons, is comforted by Honest Lil’s bringing her Afro-Cuban faith to bear.

  To raise Hudson’s spirits and to break down his stoic heartache, Lil gently goads Hudson to “break the house record” for most daiquiris consumed in one sitting at El Floridita. After building Hudson’s morale with sexual innuendo, happy stories, and alcohol, she transitions to the role of therapist. After drinking and talking for a little while with his confidant, Hudson feels a “little less sad” about “el mundo entero.” In real life, their lasting relationship appears to have been one of meaningful confidences and sincere friendship as well as emotional and possibly physical affection.

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  By February 2, 1943, the Sixth German Army surrendered to the Soviets at Stalingrad. Having met with English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, French generals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud in Casablanca, Morocco, President Roosevelt delivered on February 12, 1943, a radio address announcing the Allies’ policy of “unconditional surrender,” borrowing the phrase from American Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. On May 15, 1943, the Cuban navy’s sub-hunting boat, CS-13, sunk German U-boat 197 off the Muriel Coast.47 By the middle of May, the Allies defeated the Germans and Italians in North Africa: a perceptible demonstration of the Allies’ ability to topple the Axis war machine, halt plans for world domination, and shift momentum in the war.

  By July 25, the Grand Council of Fascism voted out Mussolini, the king ordered his arrest, and the Germans invaded northern and central Italy. In July, American workers completed the Big Inch, a twenty-four-inch-wide pipeline transporting oil from Texas to New York and greatly reducing the need for Caribbean oil during the remainder of the war. In September, SS commandos raided Alpine Campo Imperatore and rescued Mussolini, installing him as the head of state in the “Italian Social Republic,” consisting of German-occupied Italian territory.

  By the time Italy turned tables to declare war on Germany in mid-October, blood was in the water, and correspondents flooded into London in search of the stories that would define their careers. There, Martha constructed a narrative of Nazi atrocities from interviews with Polish and Dutch refugees in London and stroked faraway Ernest’s confidence: “Everyone asks after you; everyone speaks with passion of The Bell. Everyone admires you. You are a big hero in England & I only profiteer on the glory & power of your name.” She pleaded that there he would be “the darling of all. I so wish you would come…I restrain myself from sending you cables saying my dearest Bug please come at once, for fear you’d think I was sick or something and that would be a dirty trick on you. But that is what I would like to do.”48 She pleaded with him to leave the “shaming and silly life” of accepting five hundred dollars a month from the US war fund for bait and alcohol and to join her at the real war.49 Relenting, he promised to pack up the operation and to join her: “Will organize the house, close down boat, go to N.Y., eat shit, get a journalism job, which I hate more than Joyce would, and be over. Excuse bitterness.”50

  But Ernest’s bitterness also hinted at his insincerity, and instead of joining Marty and the war in Europe, he stayed in Cuba to continue hunting submarines. Like Don Quixote, supreme hero of Spanish literature, he had been chasing German U-boats for weeks at a time, always on the verge of capturing a monster across the open sea. For Jack, Patrick, and Gregory, at twenty, fifteen, and twelve years of age, being invited to this adventure with their father was arguably the best of time of their lives, a golden moment of their childhood, a cherished stretch of time with an exceptionally famous and often absent father, an incomparable and unforgettable expedition that might make up for lost time.

  Ernest’s exploits hunting submarines with his sons inspired a slightly fictionalized account of similar pursuits in Islands in the Stream, depicting similar themes and scenes from the point of view of the protagonist, Thomas Hudson, who has three sons: Tom, David, and Andrew. While one must be careful not to equate fiction with reality, a defining characteristic of Ernest Hemingway’s personality and literary production was to do exactly that.

  In three acts, the novel unfurls in Bimini, in Cuba, and at sea. In the first act, during a spear-fishing expedition snorkeling along the reef, a hammerhead shark attacks David while his father watches, powerless, the “great height of the fin, the way it turned and swung like a hound on a scent, and the way it knifed forward and still seemed to wobble.”51 Though they save the boy just in time, killing the “son of a bitching” shark with a machine gun, the incident leaves Hudson and his three sons shaken, hearts aching with the realization that they could have lost Davy, their brother and son, so rapidly.

  Later, when David hooks a thousand-pound swordfish, he shows courage by battling the beast for hours, only to lose him at the end of the fight. The son accepts his loss and discovers his character in a way that makes father Hudson marvel at him, proud.

  Throughout the forties and fifties, Ernest Hemingway had written and rewritten a passage in Islands reflecting on the temperaments of his three sons.52 In the passage, their father, like an oracle, had looked at each one and read his fate. The first son was a happy boy, but in repose, the face betrayed a great sadness. During World War II, this son, who said he was good at fly-fishing but not much else, had parachuted into occupied France with a rod and reel, returned home, and sold fishing supplies, then struggling to find his way, worked as a stockbroker for a time, before returning to the army to support his family.53 “I think,” said Jack, “he saw me as a kind of, well, blah, a nice kid, smart enough, but, let’s face it, never going to be a world beater.”54

  Though he was strong as a bear, the father wrote curiously in Islands that his second son looked just like an otter. With his small animal quality, he was affectionate, good company, and had a life of his own. This middle son had a Cartesian mind and a sense of justice. “I think in Patrick,” said the eldest son, “[father] saw the tremendous intellectual potential.”55 After attending Harvard, Patrick moved to Tanzania, became a big game hunter, a safari organizer, and a conservationist. His wife dying just after his father, Patrick would also later move close to his father’s grave in the “wild, open country” of Bozeman, Montana.

  Like his father in miniature, wrote Ernest in Islands, his third son was a “devil.” His volatility and darkness merged and became a deceptive meanness, of which his father and brothers were wary—he was bitched from the very start. Wrote Hemingway: “He was a boy born to be quite wicked who was being very good and he carried his wickedness around with him transmuted into a sort of teasing gaiety. But he was a bad boy and the others knew it and he knew it. He was just being good while his badness grew inside him.”56 The signs he read in his youngest son foretold the roller coaster that lie ahead. “I think,” said Jack, “[father] recognized in Gregory so much more of himself, the capacity for good and evil.”57 Initially showing greater promise as an athlete, a hunter, and competitor, the third son turned out to be the biggest disappointment of all. He was “a better boy all the time,” his father hoped in a letter when eleven-year-old Gigi had outperformed him, his brothers, and the other competitors at a pigeon shooting tournament at the Cerro Hunting Club. They were all proud when Havana newspapers marveled at “el popularísimo Gigi…el joven fenómeno americano,” and Ernest’s buddies had a medal engraved.58 As a teenager, the third son had typed up a short story on his father’s typewriter and entered it in a competition at his private school. He won, but it was later discover
ed that he had plagiarized it from Turgenev.59 Ernest Hemingway would eventually depict these events in the story, “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something.”

  After attending Saint John’s College in Annapolis for a year, Greg dropped out and moved to California where he became a mechanic for Douglas Aircraft, followed Scientologist guru L. Ron Hubbard, and married Shirley Jane Rhodes against his father’s wishes. Contributing to the instability in his life were his problems with alcoholism, drug abuse, manic depression, and an increasingly conflicted relationship with his parents. Since he was ten, he had struggled with gender dysphoria, experiencing excitement and liberation while dressing in the undergarments of his father’s wives. According to Greg, he never wanted to be a woman, but the desire was inescapable, somehow connected to Pauline and Ernest’s abandonment of him, their wish that he be a daughter instead of a son, and his father’s adamant quest to establish his virility, without question, at every turn. Signing up for the Eighty-Second Airborne, Greg was soon discharged in shame and checked into an asylum where he received shock therapy. After his father’s death, Greg ran off to Africa where he would shoot animals as a form of therapy for three years: “I shot eighteen elephants one month, God save my soul,” he wrote in Papa. Finally graduating from medical school, Greg would later lose his license due to his alcoholism. Growing rich through the marketing of his father’s estate, Greg became Gloria and soon after died in the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center from cardiac arrest and high blood pressure, complications from a gender reassignment operation, bipolar disorder, and his struggles with addiction.60

  In Islands in the Stream, Hemingway also explored the imagined, or eventual, loss of these sons. Soon after his sons leave Bimini to return to their mother and private schools, Hudson receives the unendurable news that David and Andrew have been killed in an auto accident with their mother near Biarritz (a fictional moment likely inspired by Jane Mason’s real accident in Havana with Ernest’s sons). This is the first tragedy of Islands, whose deep, dark currents explore the mind of a middle-aged artist who has witnessed mass destruction in World War I and Loyalist defeat in Spain, who lost his own father to suicide, who just lost several friends (Joyce, Anderson, and Fitzgerald), and whose family was not far from the horrors of World War II.