Papa Hemingway (12 page)

"Sure. I'll see you before we leave, either New York or here if we by-pass New York. Going back to Africa after all this time, there's the excitement of a first adventure. I love Africa and I feel it's another home, and any time a man can feel that, not counting where he's born, is where he's meant to go."

It was in that mood of poetic optimism that Ernest set out, in the summer of 1953, from Marseilles for Mombasa. Unfortunately, after a good beginning, it turned into an adventure of misfortune that was destined to plague him to the end of his days.

You expected to be sad in the fall.

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell

from the trees and their branches were bare

against the wind and the cold, wintry light.

But you knew there would always be the spring,

as you knew the river would flow again after

it was frozen. When the cold rains

kept on and killed the spring, it was as though

a young person had died for no reason.

A MOVAEABLE FEAST

Venice ♦ 1954

The portiere from the Gritti Palace was waiting for me as I emerged from the dry darkness of the Venice railroad station onto the brilliant quay of the noon-busy Grand Canal.

"How was your trip?" he asked, removing his visored hat and smiling.

"Just fine."

"Signor Hemingway is waiting for you at the hotel."

"How is he?"

"In good spirits."

"But what about the crashes? Is he all right?"

"Well, it seems he sustained certain injuries, but he is strong and, as always, a joyful man."

He loaded my bags onto the Gritti launch, and as we started down the canal I stood in the stern, looking backward, and considered how different this Venetian arrival was from the one before. Four years had passed since our first Venice trip with
Across the River and into the Trees.
In contrast to that good time, coming as it did on the heels of our splendid triumph in Paris, this was a relatively somber occasion. Ernest had arrived a few days before, as a passenger on the S.S.
Africa,
after a series of violent misadventures in the dense jungle near Murchison Falls in Uganda; and he had told me on the telephone that he was much more seriously hurt than anyone knew. There had been two crashes, the first less serious than the second, but it had been the first that set off the universal mourning and the obituaries, which had abruptly changed to cheering and, in fact, disbelief when Ernest had suddenly emerged from the jungle at Butiaba (press dispatches had described him as carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin, but Ernest disclaimed such elegant salvage). To the startled newsmen who had rushed to interview him, he had characteristically announced: "My luck, she is running good."

A few hours later, though, his luck had run not so good. A rescue plane, a de Havilland Rapide, had been sent to fly the Hemingways back to their base in Kenya, but it had crashed on take-off and burst into flames, and this was the crash that left its marks on Ernest.

I learned of his arrival in Venice from a cable I received in Holland, where I had been preparing an article on the royal
scandale
of the day—Queen Juliana's admission that she conducted her affairs through the occult guidance of a fortuneteller who was in residence with her at the palace. The cable from Ernest had asked me to call him at the Gritti.

Over the scratchy long-distance phone Ernest's voice had sounded surprisingly strong and vibrant. "How long you going to be lounging around that palace?" he had asked.

"I think I've lounged out my welcome," I had told him. "The palace guards have begun fingering their weapons when I approach. Does that strike you as unfriendly?"

"Yep. I think you should flee the royal life and come down here. You've got to see that Venice hasn't been damaged since we left her. I'm going to leave in a couple of days to meet Mary in Madrid and I thought you might like the ride. I have a beauty Lancia and a good driver who can race it or not. I perfer not, as we have plenty of time before the start of the Feria of San Isidro in Madrid. I could make the run alone but I'm pretty beat up from those kites falling all over Africa. We've kept it out of the funny papers, but what I drew as cards when we burned in the second kite was a ruptured kidney and the usual internal injuries, plus full upstairs concussion, double vision and so on. Now the left eye has cut out and we had a very bad brush fire down on the coast, which I had to fight, and I burned the hell out of the left hand—the good hand— and because I was weaker than I figured, I fell over and so burned belly, some of legs and forearm. Genitals okay. But, Hotch, times are just faintly rough now. To top it all off, with these few disabilities I hired on to write fifteen thousand words for
Look.
I don't mean to sound like a morbid, but I'd sure as hell like you to be along for this ride so I could cheer up."

The launch pulled alongside the dock of the Gritti, once the
palazzo
of Italian royalty, now a serenely elegant hotel which was Ernest's permanent Venetian headquarters. When I came into his room he was sitting in a chair by the windows, reading, the inevitable white tennis visor (ordered by the dozen from Abercrombie & Fitch) shading his eyes. He wore his crumpled wool bathrobe and the
gott mit uns
leather belt.

I stood for a moment in the open doorway, shocked at his appearance. I had last seen him in New York in the fall of 1953, shortly before he had left for Africa. What was shocking to me now was how he had aged in the intervening five months. What there was of his hair (most of it had been burned off) had turned from brindle to white, as had his beard; and he appeared to have diminished somewhat—I don't mean physically diminished, but some of the aura of massiveness seemed to have gone out of him.

At a table in one corner of the room sat a thin, hawk-faced man who was snipping items from a pile of newspapers. Ernest looked up as I came into the room and smiled broadly. "Hotch! Goddamn, I'm glad to see you!" He took off the tennis visor. "Help me up."

I got a grip on his arm and he slowly and painfully pulled himself up from the chair. "I feel like something coming up from the deep," he said. Then when he was solidly on his feet we shook hands Spanish-style, our left arms around each other's shoulders, pounding a few times on the back. "I hope I didn't pull you away from your work."

"No," I said, "you probably rescued me from a miserable fate."

We talked for a while and as the familiar enthusiasm and energy began to return to his speech, my apprehension lessened.

"Papa," I said, "I'm sure as hell glad to see you on your feet. That couple of days when all the papers were running your obituaries—well, they shook my confidence in the firm a little."

"Forest Lawn was already submitting bids. Very reasonable. I presume I was to be featured as a loss leader. Now over there we have Operation Obit." He led me over to the hawk-faced man, whom he introduced as Adamo, a first-class driver who was also a prominent undertaker in Udine. Adamo, it seemed, had been spending his days going through newspapers from various countries, cutting out obituaries of Ernest, which had been run at the time of the crash, and pasting them in a large scrapbook. Ernest said that he greatly enjoyed reading his obits and that his newest vice was a regular morning ritual of a glass of cold champagne and a couple of pages of obituaries. To give me a sample of their entertainment value, he picked up a clipping from a German paper which pronounced that the fatal crash was simply a fulfillment of Ernest's well-known death wish. In
Gotterdammerung
prose the article connected Ernest's supposedly dismal end with the metaphysical leopard he had placed on the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro in his story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

Ernest finally tore himself away from the obits to pour some champagne from a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck, and while he was doing so I noticed several long, narrow wooden boxes leaning against the wall; I asked about them. "Spears," Ernest said. "Was trying to learn the spear. Mary's gun-bearer, Charo, thought I could kill anything but elephant with it and could learn to kill elephant if I worked at it. But would have to work hard in the gym for that. What I had as score were wild hunting dog, hyena and leaping hare for speed. You use it like a boxer's left hand and right, and you keep punching and get inside right away.

"Christ, I wish you had been there when the going was good," Ernest said. "I wanted to write you about it but there were complications. The game ranger had left me in charge of the district, made me honorary game ranger, gazetted and commissioned as such, with duty to protect crops but kill nothing that is not a real destroyer of the necessary to live. They should have had great sheriffs like Cooper to play my part. Wish you could have seen me giving them justice without rancor. Keeping everything clean. No torture. Nobody guilty who wasn't guilty. I know it's a sin but, Christ, it is lovely to command.

"Anyhow, every time I sit down to write old Hotch, some character comes in and says, 'Bwana, the elephants are destroying my
shamb
a' —that can be his planting or his home—or the police boy, who is twenty-two and who runs the area and does not know his ass from Adam and is full of too much zeal, arrives, completely destroyed, and says, 'Bwana, we must block the passes. They are coming through, running arms with Masai donkeys. How many men can you commit?'

"I know it is ten to one to be ballroom bananas, but I always know there is that one, so I say, 'I have six fighting men with service in K.A.R. or in the Scouts'—not Boy Scouts—'whom I can arm, and four spears. How many passes are you blocking?'

" 'Four,' he says. 'I'll brigade my twelve men with yours.'

" 'Who will block the two unknown roads to Amboseli?'

" 'You.'

" 'Shit-maru,' I say, having my pen in my hand to write to old Hotch, but he doesn't get written to. This type of operation takes all night. Three nonarms carrying donkeys are intercepted. But I do it for our Queen. The men stand at attention. God bless our Queen. God bless Miss Mary. God bless old Hotch-maru.

"Cut to the next incident, when not writing to old Hotch but exhausted and in bed. We hear the noise of the Land-Rover of the police; he is beat up, confused and overdisheveled. 'Bwana, there is a lion terrorizing Laitokitok!"

" 'How many lions? Sex of same?'

" 'A single male lion. He has just killed a goat one-half mile from town.'

" 'I will pay for the goat.'

" 'No, Bwana. As honorary game ranger you must kill the lion.'

"I buckle on the equipment and we go. When I get back to the tent, Miss Mary says, 'Papa, you must really stop chasing lions in the middle of the night. Do you realize you have not taken any rest since August twenty-seventh?' Since it is then the beginning of December, I do not know what type of rest I took on that specific date. Probably packing to get off the boat." Ernest's back suddenly seemed to bother him and he reached back and massaged it.

"How are you, Papa? I mean really?"

"Well, leave us consult the evidence." He started toward the bathroom and I followed. On a table near the door was a large bottle of rubbing alcohol—Ernest rarely bathed in water, preferring alcohol sponge-baths. On another table in the corner between the tub and the sink were a half-dozen glasses containing urine. Ernest picked up one of them and studied its dark contents in the light. "Couldn't piss for two days on account of plugged somewhere with kidney cell material. Finally passed it okay. Look at the damn stuff—you can see it in there floating around like quill toothpicks. The color spooks me. Prune juice. The doctor on the boat was very good. Gave me some stuff for the kidneys and scissored away all the dead flesh from the burns—very classy doctor—but, listen, Hotch . . ." He picked at his beard for a moment, seemingly ill at ease; then he smiled. "Goddamn, but I'm glad to see your freckled face."

He hesitated a bit and then began again—more seriously. "What I was thinking about this trip . . . listen, sit down . .!"

I sat down on the toilet seat; he had suddenly transformed the bathroom into an office. "Now that I've leveled with you on how beat up I am . . . you know how I've always held back on the stuff I was going to write, inventory stuff, insurance against the dry-up . . . but the way I'm feeling, I thought we might take it easy. It's beauty country, and I could tell you some of it so that if I never actually got around to it, then someone would know. I don't mean to sound like a morbid, but every time you take out insurance it's an act of morbidity, isn't it?"

"Hell, Papa, give yourself time to heal. Don't worry about that inventory. You'll get to it all right."

"Well, don't make book on it," he said, "till you get a reading on the odds." He led the way out of the bathroom and was happy to see a fresh bottle of champagne in the cooler. As he uncorked the champagne, which was one of Mary's favorites,

I asked about her.