Hemingway's Boat (14 page)

There's no documentary record of what transpired at the museum, but things had to have gone well, judging from subsequent correspondence. Surely the celebrity in their midst would have taken a little time out to look at mounted fish, at beetles and shells and minerals in glass cases, at the recently installed dioramas of wildlife. That would have brought back memories of Saturday boyhood outings to The Field Museum of Natural History on Lake Shore Drive in downtown Chicago.

Late that night: he's hurtling through blackness on the Havana Special, proudest train name of the Florida East Coast Railway. At the end of the nineteenth century, industrialist Henry Flagler invented South Florida as
a world-class tourist destination. Then, in the first years of the twentieth, the empire builder sought to polish his myth by erecting the Key West Extension: 157 miles of track, over trestles and bridges and viaducts, across coral and mangrove swamps and limestone outcrops and spits of sand, to the southernmost town in the continental United States. (On a meridian, it lies 755 miles farther south than Los Angeles.) As you go down, the Gulf's on your right, the deep-blue Atlantic on your left. Flagler's Key West Extension, completed in 1912, never made a profit; now, in the mid-Depression, passenger traffic on the line is down to one train a day in each direction. The extension's in receivership. Seventeen months hence—September 1935—the “Railroad that Went to Sea” will be wiped away by a murderous hurricane, and afterward the remains of its bridges, viaducts, and roadbeds would be used by the government to construct highway U.S. 1. By 1938, travelers by land will be able to go to the bottom of the Keys via a two-lane without having to drive their car onto a ferry between some of the islands.

The Havana Special is so named because of the way it connects at the end of the line with six-hour steamer service to Cuba. The waiting boats anchor at the town's old seaport, out at Trumbo Point. The trains chug in along the north side of the island and pull up to the piers alongside the boats. The passengers walk down the steps of their Pullman car and up the gangplank of the Peninsular & Occidental Steamship Company.

The rest of this has to be conjured, the train rolling through the dull electric glow of cities and towns on the other side of a Pullman glass, Perryville and Baltimore and Washington and Richmond and Savannah and Jacksonville and St. Augustine and East Palatka and Daytona and West Palm Beach; the deeply satisfied man going in and out of dining cars and lounge cars with their white-jacketed Filipino waiters and silver-stand ashtrays. By morning light of the second day, Wednesday, April 11, 1934, Hemingway's on the five-hour leg out of Miami: Homestead, Florida City, Key Largo, Rock Harbor, Plantation, Islamorada, Marathon, Big Pine, Pirates Cove, Boca Chica, and, at last, at almost exactly noon, end of the line, end of the continent, the little water-encircled town of 11,600 “conchs.” Locals amuse themselves here by cultivating orchids in the forks of trees, tying them in with nylon hosiery, so that their white, twisty, spindly-legged roots will work down the sides of the trees, embedding themselves in the bark like bulged veins in a grotesque leg. Almost all the cigar factories have closed down. The average income is seven dollars a month. Civic government operates like a lazy Latin palace, and the city council will soon
declare municipal bankruptcy. A Negro orchestra plays in a downtown hotel every Saturday night and balcony seats at the picture show go for a dime (fifteen cents in the orchestra). Turtle is one of the local delicacies. The evening sky can bleed from pink to red to purple into the deepest azures, and the sailor bars along the wharves are like dank caves of sin. Maybe best of all, mornings are glassy and cool, raked with the sea's quiet. Ernest Hemingway is going to continue to live and work and sink himself deeply into the offerings of the sensual world in this subtropical offshore place for about another five years before upending everything again and expatriating himself and his boat and his not-yet-third wife more or less permanently to Cuba, an even more exotic locale for a writer.

Thirty-six hours after boarding in Philadelphia, he's stepping down from his Pullman car to cheers and a jazz band.
The Key West Citizen
has a reporter on hand to take notes and to get it semi-accurately. The story will be on page one tomorrow, a one-column news feature, alongside a larger piece about FDR having just concluded a fishing trip in the Bahamas.

After eight months away, with a new boat coming, with a new book brewing, with two of your boys and your wife and John and Katy Dos Passos and half a dozen other friends waiting for you at the bottom of the steps, with live jazz, in the sunshine, you're home.

There's a small park in Old Havana called the Plaza de Armas where you can sit on cracked marble early in the morning, before the heat gets up. It's a block from Hemingway's hotel. The park dates from the 1600
s. It's shaded by immense trees, with a fountain in the middle. A crew of elderly women, in their blue smocks, their heads turbaned in towels, come to clean the park every morning. They work with stiff brooms and dustpans connected to long swivel handles. They inch along. It might take half an hour to make a ten-by-fifteen-foot section pristine again from the cigarette butts and gum wrappers and condoms of the night before. They'll even comb the dirt around the protruding roots of the royal palms and Chinese banyan trees. They jabber in Spanish
.

By nine or so, the park is filling up with locals and tourists—Spaniards who've been disgorged the night before from Iberia 747
s, Germans, South Americans. By then, too, the booksellers, who set up their portable wooden stalls every day on the perimeter of the park, are hard at their hawking—postcards of Che, last year's calendars, Marxist manifestos, water-swollen baseball guides from the Cuban pro leagues of, say
,
1946
,
bookmarks of Fidel and Hemingway shaking hands the one time they ever met. It's something like the booksellers along the Seine in Paris. Presently, cartoonists materialize to produce ten-second likenesses with Flair pens on sheets of slick paper, hoping for the illicit Yankee buck in your pocket. Afro-Cuban women in flowing Technicolor garb, with firetruck-red lipstick, are coming over to plant huge stencil-like kisses on your cheek, hoping for the same payday. Vendors selling peanuts in skinny white paper cones are also passing by. The music makers are best, though. With their gourds and guitars and homemade instruments, they begin writhing around, their bodies transforming into S curves. They'll laugh and pull you from your seat and try to get you to dance with them. (It'll make you think of Hemingway, who famously couldn't dance a lick. On the dance floor, he was said to be like a trained bear in a bad circus.) Meanwhile, the old women who've put the park new again have slipped from sight. They must be home, in their airless apartments, rich with Cuban aromas
.

The Plaza de Armas is situated almost exactly halfway between the hotel room where Hemingway drove his thoughts and memory-sensations
into literature and the docks where he nightly secured his boat, in that first summer of
Pilar
's history, after he'd brought her over to Havana for the striped marlin runs. If you've ever read anything about Hemingway in Cuba, before his permanent relocation there at the end of the 1930
s, you know that the Ambos Mundos was his favorite hotel. The name means “both worlds,” new and old, Cuban and Spanish. Room 511 is a Hemingway shrine—maybe Fidel himself wouldn't be allowed to sleep in it. The room is claimed to have the best view and cross-ventilation in the hotel and possibly in the city. It's a large corner room, in a triangle shape. When you take the state-run tour of the room, it'll make you remember all over again what a gift and sense and intuition he had for locating himself in the best symbolic place. The great critic Alfred Kazin once said that. For so many years, that luck and art and intuition held
.

In 1934
,
a room at the Ambos Mundos cost Hemingway two dollars a day. The hotel boasted one hundred rooms—with one hundred baths
.

On one side of 511 there are three floor-to-ceiling windows with white louvered shutters opening onto a balcony. The bed, low to the floor, is in an alcove, giving it a protected feeling. There's an old hulking black phone in the room and also a black typewriter on a wooden desk. In the carriage of the typewriter is a blank page. On a wall is a framed photocopy of the purchase order for
Pilar.
Hemingway couldn't glimpse his boat from his balcony, but he must have been happy knowing she was down there, waiting for what big fish and fight the next day might bring
.

He once described room 511 in
Esquire.

The elevator he speaks of is still operating—a 1926 Otis, with a black wire cage
.

Sitting in the Plaza de Armas, on one of the smooth slabs on the south
side of the square, resting your back against the iron grillwork, you can look to your left, up Calle Obispo, and make out the entryway to the Ambos Mundos. And if you turn your head in the other direction and crane your neck, you can catch the sun's glare glinting off the harbor between the buildings. You can feel yourself, with some imagination, secretly and privately suspended between the San Francisco wharf, where
Pilar
slept, and the room where her owner slept and where pages of
Green Hills of Africa
got shined like stones
.

So imagine him, on mornings he didn't go out in the boat, on the fifth floor, behind the white balcony, the windows open, the curtains billowing inward, after having read the papers, after a glass of Vichy water and maybe a tumbler of cold milk and a piece of hard Cuban bread, seated now in a straight-backed chair, working in longhand, the intense concentration, advancing the book he'd begun back in his Key West workroom, right after getting home from Africa. By the time he came over to Cuba in the third week of July, he was three months into it and had more than two hundred manuscript pages. In the beginning he hadn't even known it was a book—perhaps only a long short story. The original sheets of the 491
-page handwritten manuscript of
Green Hills—
the copy that Hemingway gave over to a typist in late 1934
—
are preserved in a maroon-colored, acid-free slipcase in a belowground room in a special collections library at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It's thrilling to untie the ribbon and lift out the first sheet and peer at the several strike-throughs and one circled insertion of his simple, declarative, action-starting, opening sentence:
“We were sitting in the blind that Wanderobo hunters had built of twigs and branches at the edge of the salt lick when we heard the truck coming.”

Could he have anticipated the degree to which some writers and critics in New York and elsewhere would be lying in wait for this book? Maybe, for he called them—in the book itself—“angleworms.” He said that critics were the lice crawling on literature. The following year, fall of '35
,
he'd go up to Manhattan for the book's launch, only to slink back home in rage when it was clear the reviews were starting to turn against him—the “black ass,” Hemingway used to call these rages, which could last for weeks, cause stark-awake insomnia, prompt not just new expressions but seeming promises, guarantees, of self-destruction
.