Hemingway's Boat

ALSO BY PAUL HENDRICKSON

Seminary: A Search

Looking for the Light:
The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott

The Living and the Dead:
Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War

Sons of Mississippi:
A Story of Race and Its Legacy

We have a wonderful current in the Gulf still in spite of the changes in weather and we have 29 good fish so far. Now they are all very big and each one is wonderful and different. I think you would like it very much; the leaving of the water and the entering into it of the huge fish moves me as much as the first time I ever saw it. I always told Mary that on the day I did not feel happy when I saw a flying fish leave the water I would quit fishing.

—E
RNEST
H
EMINGWAY
, in a letter, September 13, 1952

Then, astern of the boat and off to starboard, the calm of the ocean broke open and the great fish rose out of it, rising, shining dark blue and silver, seeming to come endlessly out of the water, unbelievable as his length and bulk rose out of the sea into the air and seemed to hang there until he fell with a splash that drove the water up high and white.

“Oh God,” David said. “Did you see him?”

“His sword's as long as I am,” Andrew said in awe.

“He's so beautiful,” Tom said. “He's much better than the one I had in the dream.”

—Islands in the Stream

The dark is different in Havana. It's lit in a kind of amber glow, as if everything's on low generator, weak wattage. If you come into Cuba for the first time at nighttime, this feeling of strange darkness is intensified. Even the plane must sense this—or at least the pilot—for it seems to hang forever in a low, back-powered glide, as if working through a tunnel, before hitting the runway with a smack at Aeropuerto Internacional José Martí La Habana. You emerge from the Jetway into a terminal with the complexion of tea water. In the customs and immigration area, soldiers in the olive drab of the Revolution are walking large dogs. If your papers are in order, a latch on a door clicks open. Like that, you're on the other side of a lost world that's always been so seductively near and simultaneously so far
.

On
Pilar
, off Cuba, midsummer 1934

MAY 2005
. I went to Havana partly for the reason that I suspect almost any American without a loved one there would wish to go: to drink in a place that's been forbidden to American eyes (at least mostly forbidden) for half a century. So I wanted to smoke a Cohiba cigar, an authentic one—and I did. I wanted to flag down one of those chromeless Studebaker taxis (or Edsels or Chevy Bel Airs, it didn't matter) that roll down the Prado at their comic off-kilter angles, amid plumes of choking smoke—and I did. I got in and told the cabbie:
“Nacional, por favor.”
I was headed to the faded and altogether wonderful Spanish Colonial monstrosity of a hotel where you're certain Nat King Cole and Durante are in the bar at the far end of the lobby (having just come in on Pan Am from Idlewild), and Meyer Lansky is plotting something malevolent in a poolside cabana while the trollop beside him rubies her nails. I also wanted to stand at dusk at the giant seawall called the Malecón that rings much of the city so I could watch the surf beat against it in phosphorescent hues while the sun went down like some enormous burning wafer. I wanted to walk those sewer-fetid and narrow cobbled streets in Habana Vieja and gaze up at those stunning colonial mansions, properties of the state, carved up now
into multiple-family dwellings, with their cracked marble entryways and falling ceiling plaster and filigree balconies flying laundry on crisscrossses of clothesline.

Mostly, though, I went to Cuba to behold—in the flesh, so to speak—Ernest Hemingway's boat.

She was sitting up on concrete blocks, like some old and gasping browned-out whale, maybe a hundred yards from Hemingway's house, under a kind of gigantic carport with a corrugated-plastic roof, on what was once his tennis court, just down from the now-drained pool where Ava Gardner had reputedly swum nude. Even in her diminished, dry-docked, parts-plundered state, I knew
Pilar
would be beautiful, and she was. I knew she'd be threatened by the elements and the bell-tolls of time, in the same way much else at the hilltop farm on the outskirts of Havana—Finca Vigía was its name when Hemingway lived there—was seriously threatened, and she was. But I didn't expect to be so moved.

I walked round and round her. I took rolls and rolls of pictures of her long, low hull, of her slightly raked mahogany stern, of her nearly vertical bow. When the guards weren't looking, I reached over and touched her surface. The wood, marbled with hairline fissures, was dusty, porous, dry. It seemed almost scaly. It felt febrile. It was as if
Pilar
were dying from thirst. It was as if all she wanted was to get into water. But even if it were possible to hoist her with a crane off these blocks and to ease her onto a flatbed truck and to take her away from this steaming hillside and to set her gently into Havana Harbor, would Hemingway's boat go down like a stone, boiling and bubbling to the bottom, her insides having long ago been eaten out by termites and other barely visible critters?

A man who let his own insides get eaten out by the diseases of fame had dreamed new books on this boat. He'd taught his sons to reel in something that feels like Moby Dick on this boat. He'd accidentally shot himself in both legs on this boat. He'd fallen drunk from the flying bridge on this boat. He'd written achy, generous, uplifting, poetic letters on this boat. He'd propositioned women on this boat. He'd hunted German subs on this boat. He'd saved guests and family members from shark attack on this boat. He'd acted like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk on this boat.

She'd been intimately his, and he hers, for twenty-seven years—which were his final twenty-seven years. She'd lasted through three wives, the Nobel Prize, and all his ruin. He'd owned her, fished her, worked her, rode her, from the waters of Key West to the Bahamas to the Dry Tortugas
to the north coast and archipelagoes of Cuba. She wasn't a figment or a dream or a literary theory or somebody's psychosexual interpretation—she was actual. Onto her varnished decks, hauled in over her low-cut stern on a large wooden roller, had come uncounted marlin and broadbill swordfish, tuna, sailfish, kingfish, snook, wahoos, tarpon, horse-eye jacks, pompano, dolphinfish, barracuda, bonito, and mako sharks, which, as Hemingway once remarked, are the ones that smell oddly sweet and have those curved-in teeth that give them their Cuban name,
dentuso
.