Ernesto Read online

  Ernest wired Max Perkins on January 21, 1932, that he had finished the first draft of his treatise on bullfighting. Then until March he fished and explored the Keys with Pauline, Carol, Bra Saunders, Joe Russell, Mike Strater, Archibald MacLeish, Uncle Gus, Charlie and Lorine Thompson, John and Katy Dos Passos, and other friends and invited guests. Even so, he found the time to write “After the Storm,” a diver’s frantic attempt to recover buried treasure from the sunken liner Valbanera that had just capsized during a hurricane. Having lifted the story from a real Caribbean pirate whom he admired, Bra Saunders, he polished it in March for publication in Cosmopolitan magazine two months later. It became one of his most haunting stories contrasting human frailty with the power of the sea.

  At the same time, the Cuban president assured his people that the protection of the republic justified suspension of civil liberties, imprisonments, and acts of violence in secret prisons, attempting to eliminate all enemies of the state.118 On New Year’s Day, the first bomb interrupted a meeting of the Tobacco Selectors’ Union in Santa Clara; on the twelfth of January, twelve separate bombs exploded all over Havana; on the twenty-fifth, police discovered a car packed with dynamite, nails, and glass; before the end of the month, the ABC had mined a house on Flores Street and killed two police officers in their booby trap; on February 19 terrorists threw a bomb onto a bus to injure three passengers; and on February 28 synchronized attacks during the primary election resulted in the shooting and bombing a man and a woman and two bombs exploding in Santiago with no casualties.119 Back in the United States, there was also unrest as twenty-five thousand men of the Bonus Army, Ernest’s World War I comrades in arms, marched on the capital and established a “Hooverville,” a camp where they would wait for President Herbert Hoover and Congress to hand over the $2.39 billion that they believed the US Treasury had pocketed from their retirement pay.120

  CHAPTER 3

  Adventures as Close as Cuba (1932–1934)

  It was quiet in the center of Key West. On the street there were few vehicles, aside from the occasional bicycle. Sitting on their covered porches, some residents smoked pipes, the floors creaking as they rocked back on their chairs’ hindquarters, listening to rumba on the radio, its faint clamor escaping as a screen door creaked open, then snapped shut. At the shaded corner of a grocery store, two men loafed beneath the branches of a tree, and a group of children played in front of what townspeople called the “old Negro church.”1

  Rows of small wooden houses, built closely together, continued for several blocks; the sun had baked the thin walls brittle, and the sea wind had taken their paint away, leaving them as colorless and forgotten as abandoned bones.2 As you left the center of town, the tight rows of houses ended abruptly. Behind a tall iron fence, the landscape opened into a grassy lawn surrounded by palm trees. Among the trees sat a fortresslike house in Spanish Colonial style, as old and grand as any in New Orleans: arched, shuttered windows, covered wraparound balcony, black ironwork zigzagging between the rails. Built during the Civil War, it had withstood the weather, remaining there while hurricanes lifted rows of other houses clean away.

  In a round fisherman’s hat with a turned-up brim and a striped, long-sleeved Basque jersey, Ernest looked like a figure from an Impressionist painting as he emerged merrily from his door with his cousin from Kansas City, Bud White, in tow. Swooping overhead, the beacon of the lighthouse came ‘round in front of his house, over the town, and out to sea, and Ernest looked up through trails of clouds at stars—sparkling as clean as raindrops in the sky after the rain. They set off walking beneath the royal palms on either side of Whitehead Street toward the marina, where Ernest would soon depart for Cuba. As the night freshened, they could smell the bougainvillea mingling with the ocean breeze. In the high grass between the shotgun houses, toads croaked and crickets fiddled in a symphony aching with desire.

  Having kissed her husband at the threshold, Pauline shuffled up the stairs with newborn Gregory in her arms, and standing behind a balcony rail, stared at the homme de lettres et d’aventure,3 bounding through the village where they had recently made their home. The renovation of 907 Whitehead Street dragged on, requiring her to respond to carpenters, painters, plumbers, and electricians, trying to make the historic building a hospitable home.4 They had hung Ernest’s hunting trophies on the walls, elk heads from numerous trips west, and arranged the antiques they’d recently imported from France. After Gregory had been born, and with the renovation, Ernest’s writing, the fishing, and other trips, they had been seeing rather less of each other, so she planned to take a steamer over to join him in a couple of days.5

  Watching him until he was gone, she called out “Ada!” and grew impatient as she awaited the new nanny. Handing off the baby, just five months old, she looked in on his brother Patrick who was nearly three years old. Coming to as his mother entered the room with fine hair clinging to his warm forehead, the boy asked her for the news, “Has Papa gone to Cuba yet?”

  “Yes. Now go to sleep, darling,” she said, sweeping the fine hair from his brow and sneering at her likeness in his somber eyes. The boy turned on his side, and his mother continued to caress his hair. A few minutes later he fell asleep, and she got up and left him just as she heard the baby cry out in the next room.

  Dusk burned off along the edges of Key West harbor as Ernest and Bud ducked into Thompson’s Hardware to retrieve tackle and Charlie Thompson, by then one of Ernest’s closest friends. The three men slogged across the hollow planks of the dock toward the Anita, Joe Russell’s boat, anchored at the end of the pier. They could hear Joe Russell, whom Ernest had nicknamed “Josie Grunts,” aboard, grunting as he tended to do, loading the gear, and running the engines.6 In the sky the moon was shining bright and casting her clear reflection on the surface of the murky water, between the boats.7 Earlier in the day, they had loaded iceboxes with their provisions, leaving one compartment empty for the bait they could buy fresh the next morning on the other side.

  The other side. Having heard the stories, embroidered by the fishermen he knew, Ernest now needed to see one of those majestic creatures for himself. The fish running off the coast of Cuba were said to grow to enormous size. Over there, he could rent a room for next to nothing and fish as much as he liked. In the morning there would be a quiet space for his writing. There would be no children, only his work, the sea, and Havana.

  It was true that chasing those fish would require considerable expense, but seeing those monsters of mythical proportions would be worth it. Besides, “Josie” said they could do it on ten dollars per person, counting fuel and expenses…and if they loaded up the boat with liquid “Hoover gold” on the return trip…?8 The ban on alcohol was only enforced on the northern side of the Straits, so carrying sacs of rum from Havana to Key West could not only pay for the trip but might also turn an attractive profit if all went right.

  Josie had been the first to bring a load of liquor across the straights from Cuba to Key West.9 Claiming more than 150 trips to his credit, Josie was an experienced smuggler who operated a Key West drinking and gambling joint known as the Blind Pig (a generic Florida term for a bar operating outside the law), and he propositioned Ernest to come in as a “silent partner.”10 Each trip across could thus serve the dual purpose of hunting marlin and turning profit from contraband liquor, but the better part of valor being discretion, Josie preferred to make their crossings by night.11

  The moon shining across the surface of an inky sea, Charlie and Ernest untied the boat, pushed the bow clear, and leapt in, giggling, as she drifted off the end of the dock. The Kermath engine sputtered and grumbled in the dark water. As the engine took hold, pushing the weight of the ship, they steered her slowly out of the harbor and into the currents of the sea. When they passed the rusty orange buoy that marked the harbor’s end, they could see gulls sleeping in the cages at the top of it, though the gulls took little notice of them.

  At last the boat was plunging southward through the dark water, and
Josie was sitting on a stool in front of the helm. His captain’s hat, with shining bill and embroidered gold leaf, was cocked back. In the shadowy recesses of the cockpit, they drank coffee from the thermos Charlie had filled at the store before they left. The deafening noise of the engine was everywhere, and the boat skipped steadily ahead. Josie produced a flask, brandy he had been saving for the trip. Steering the boat while extending it to his friend, Josie looked at Ernest from the crazy corners of his eyes as he took a sip. Having tasted it, Ernest licked it from the ends of his mustache, then felt an unanticipated burn deep in his throat, a cough escaped, and another, and another, so he stepped aft into the open air so that he could catch his breath. Josie laughed and slapped his friend across the back. Holding on firmly to the rail of the ship, Ernest looked out across black waves, whose shards were bright as the clouds, and drew a deep breath of night into his broad chest and felt happy to be alive.

  Cutting through the current, the low-slung thirty-four-foot “bootlegger boat” moved slowly out in the open.12 Riding high in the water, with a one-hundred-horsepower engine, she could do no more than eight knots an hour. The low roof offered little headroom but cut down her wind resistance and offered some protection from the sun. But she trolled well, would save gas, and her wide stern gave them the space to set up two fighting chairs and to work the lines, to bring in the bigger fish.13 All in all, she was a good boat for fishing, and they were glad to have her.14 So it was on April 23, 1932, that Ernest Hemingway departed on his first fishing expedition to Cuba.15

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  —

  The lighthouse informed their approach as they passed between El Morro and La Punta off their starboard side. In the semidarkness, they could hear oars lapping as fishermen rowed intently out to sea. The rising sun painted the colors of morning across the sky. Checking in at the Coast Guard station at the entrance to the bay, they motored the Anita gently through and moored her to the old pier, San Francisco, and they went ashore in quest of a hot breakfast.16 At the Pearl Café, a waiter in a black bow tie and vest set the table with toasted Cuban bread, fresh butter, guava jelly, boiled eggs, and steaming hot café con leche. With spoonfuls of island sugar, they sweetened the strong Cuban coffee that had been mixed with creamy dollops of steaming milk. They moistened the billowy bread by dipping it into the hot coffee and savored its sweet and simple richness.

  As the pale dawn seeped in at the corners of the horizon, they could see at the entrance of the harbor a small cluster of fishing smacks, bobbing afloat, with their lines reaching deep into the water. Working the coral bottom for muttonfish, mackerel, snapper, kingfish, and baitfish to sell along the docks, men sat or stood with hands in their pockets waiting in their boats.

  When they had finished eating and were feeling better, Josie asked the waiter if he knew a good “jig,” a man for rigging baits, an honest day’s work.17 Folding his apron and sucking at the spaces between his teeth, the waiter walked out along the pier and spoke with several men sitting there waiting along the railing of the docks. A Negro man in his late fifties jumped to his feet with his hat in his hand and nodded at them across the way. Josie and Ernest looked at each other, rose from their table, and approached, extending a hand in greeting.

  In a single word of heavily accented but functional Spanish, Josie got down to business: “¿Carnada?” Nodding, the old man pointed to the end of the dock and walked ahead of them to ask around for the bait they required. Another man opened a chest filled with ice and the bait-sized mackerel and kingfish he had to sell, while all stared at one another with direct and attentive eyes.

  After they bought the bait, the jig wrapped it for them in a newspaper. They walked down the dock and aboard the Anita. Looking like he had always been there, the old jig sat down on the deck of their ship, and his fingers went to work immediately, agilely rigging the baits. Then they cast off, Josie steering them across the harbor and around the peninsula.18 After the night’s crossing, they might have been exhausted if it had not been for the coffee racing through their blood and the excitement of their first day’s fishing ahead. There would be plenty of time for sleep once they had pulled their first monster from the sea.

  Along the peninsula, a single gray heron walking gracefully atop its slender legs turned its S-shaped neck to glare back at them with beady yellow eyes before slinging its wings downward and taking flight gloriously over them as they approached. Beyond the harbor, scattered in the dark blue and silver-speckled water as far as they could see, were hazy silhouettes becoming the sharp outlines of weathered fishing smacks as the day awakened. Drifting with the current, these fishermen were hunting marlin travelling deep, with four to six lines at forty to sixty fathoms.19

  To trap schools of fish between them, marlins often hunt in pairs. With impressive speed, the jig assembled a mobile made of baitfish, like the set of stringed figures hanging above a baby’s bed, a sort of mackerel chandelier, which underwater would resemble the small schools that marlins feed upon. By using “teasers,” or baitfish tied to slightly longer lines, the jig even simulated the stragglers that become separated from the school as the marlin closes in.

  Hearts jumped when they felt a series of strikes on the line set sixty fathoms below, but then the strikes were gone, and they had not hooked anything. When the bites stopped altogether, and the sun was high above, they decided to return to port and rest for the following day. When they brought in the line, the jig showed them the hook. They could see that a large fish deep below had been eating at the bait.20

  Bunking aboard the Anita, the four friends took their turns standing watch, and as luck would have it, it did not rain, or possibly they had been too tired to notice or hear any of the many noises in the port.21 Arising early the next morning, they had a simple breakfast and lost no time in motoring out. Seeing so many rowboats in the waters off the Morro, Josie suggested that they use the motor to their advantage by trolling marlin that might be travelling at fifteen to twenty fathoms. Ernest and Charlie nodded. Attached at the Anita’s rear corners were two long poles with lines dragging in the wake, churning amidst the waves and looking from a distance like two giant whips. They ran from east to west, trolling for marlin swimming against the current.

  They fished throughout the morning without a bite, and it was turning into afternoon when a dorsal fin broke the surface of the water; drumming Ernest’s shoulder, Josie pointed at it as he licked his lips. Beneath the surface of the waves the fish’s pectoral fins were spread such that it seemed to be flying through the blue water like some magnificent aquatic bird, but in its great hunger, it had abandoned its fear and was coming for the bait.

  When the marlin came up to strike, it smashed at the bait, its bill slapping the water like a Chinese firecracker—then its tail rose above the surface as it pounced.22 The jig had already taken the rod, and he handed it to Ernest while Charlie and Bud hurried to help him put on a harness and set himself in a chair. Josie urged him to be patient—to let the marlin take the bait.

  Wait, darn it, be patient, now, be patient, Ernest, oh jeez…well, what are we waiting for? Yank back now! Ernest pulled back hard on the rod, striking once, several times, and hoping with all his might that he had driven the hook into the fish’s jaw rather than yanked it right out of his mouth. Then a pause…five eternal seconds of agony when all imagined the worst, the unthinkable—that after spending two days hunting, they had blown it again. Lost him? Oh crickets, had they lost him? Oh, Heaven, please make it that it was not so.23

  The line screeched hot off the reel, for the fish, summoning all his strength, took it and began to run. The great weight of the marlin shot straight out into the stretch of water in front of them, then dove down, down, down toward the bottom like a derailed train, nearly yanking the rod from Ernest’s hands. Charlie and the jig came over to help. Forgetting to steer, Josie was shouting, “Give the fish some line!”

  When they had given all five hundred yards of line that they had to give, Josie turned the Ani
ta to follow in the direction of the fish and instructed Ernest to bring the line in as carefully as he could. Trying to keep it from slipping in his hands, Ernest slowly turned the crank of the reel. On the right side of his forehead, in a receding hairline, the large hook-shaped scar that he had acquired one drunken night in Paris by pulling a skylight on top of himself was now turning bright red, like a hot brand on a bull. Of course, he knew that he had to give the fish some line, then make him fight for it, but how much could he take back and not break it?

  The rod was pinned to the boat with half of it underwater, so he lifted it cautiously, until he managed to place the butt into the socket of the harness. Then, pulling slowly, he tested with gentle pressure against the fish’s great strength. Noticing that he was drenched in sweat, feeling the great ache in his arms, and noting the spots of lights in his peripherals, he realized that the contest had just begun.

  Gathering his senses, he balanced the rod in the harness bit and turned the reel over slowly in his hands. There was an unexpected click, and the rod bent back, alarming as it doubled from the resistance of the line. Then the line was no longer moving at all. Afraid that he would break it, Ernest held firmly and did not move. In the boat, there were Ernest, the Cuban jig, Josie, Charlie, with the gaff in his hands, and cousin Bud, all connected in one impulse, awaiting…the marlin at the other end. There was an unbroken synchrony, a trance of exhilaration. There was this fight, this action, and nothing else. It was an old feeling that he had first known as a boy with his father on the lake, but those trout were a child’s game compared to this.

  It went on like that for hours. Each time the fish’s heavy pull subsided, they convinced themselves they were near the end. Then the fight began again. Ernest reeled the line in slowly, working for every painful inch, lifting the rod upright, terrified that he would break it against the force of the fish. Then he felt something new, and he allowed himself to believe that the fish was coming up. Yes, it was there, rising in the water. The fish was coming up. When he told Charlie to get ready with the gaff, the fish, having other ideas, changed directions and shot beneath their boat in a silver streak just like a torpedo, pulling the line behind him persuasively in the opposite direction that they had been travelling.