The Domino Diaries (13 page)

“The offers followed you everywhere you fought?”

“
Everywhere
.” He laughed. “Suitcases of money popped open from ringside. Crumpled-up paper thrown into the ring with dollar figures just to talk. Just to
talk
more money than I would see in ten years living here.”

“You like Dickens?” I asked H
é
ctor.

“Yes, I like him.”

“Aren't you Rigondeaux's ghost of Christmas Past?”

“
A Christmas Carol
was not so popular here.” H
é
ctor smiled. “Christmas was banned in Cuba for many years until the Pope visited our island and Fidel reinstated it. He did not reinstate El Duque, and so he escaped to the Yankees.”

“But not you.”

“Not me.” H
é
ctor shook his head, and when he looked away I wasn't sure if he was looking into his past or Rigondeaux's future.

 

10

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called [by] the Masai “Ng
à
je Ng
à
i,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

—Ernest Hemingway,
The Snows of Kilimanjaro

I
T'S HARD TO WALK
in any direction here without bumping into politics. What King Midas was to gold, Fidel might be even more to politics. Sports took you there. Hemingway did, too. Like his metaphorical leopard, I'd wondered for a long time what America's most famous writer was seeking from Cuba for the last twenty years of his life. How could someone like him support Fidel? I'd heard the captain of his beloved
Pilar
had even gained his permission to carry explosives for the revolutionaries. How could America give Hemingway such a pass for this?

Hemingway and Castro only met once, in 1960. Very few photographs of the meeting exist and the one movie camera filming their union lasts about as long as the Zapruder film. They met right after Fidel entered—and
won
—Hemingway's annual fishing tournament. Fidel was asked why he was so eager to meet Hemingway and casually explained that he'd always envied his adventures. Hemingway had lived in Cuba for twenty years leading up to and during the revolution. While Tolstoy had, in Hemingway's terminology, “gotten in the ring” with Napoleon, Hemingway—after taking on World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II, with the Cuban revolution taking place in his own backyard—never went near Castro or what he was up against in print. To me, that was a far more compelling mystery than whatever that leopard was sniffing around for.

After training one day, I took the long way home along the sea, turning off the Prado promenade, with the Morro fortress and the lighthouse behind me. While I was training with H
é
ctor, one of his students tapped me on the shoulder and warned me about not missing him fighting on HBO when I got home. “You'll see.” His eyes sparkled. “Don't be surprised when you see me.” Of course this was a kid who had zero access to HBO or any other American television that wasn't pirated and sold on the street. If he had been growing up in the 1990s he could have been thrown in jail for having so much as an American dollar on him.

It gnawed at me as a fisherman along the Malec
ó
n waved hello. An old fisherman with a mustache cast a hunk of bread just over the crest of the last wave that broke against the wall. A fish bit quickly and he reeled it in and removed his shoe in order to clunk the fish on the head and drop it wriggling into the pail nestled between his ankles. He rigged another hook and relit his peso “torpedo” cigar. Beyond the fisherman's line were some cruise ships headed for the harbor. Beyond them were warships. The fisherman wasn't paying attention to either. He stared at his line while the death rattle of the fish in the bucket petered out.

The day before, the staff had let me inside the Finca Vig
í
a, Hemingway's house on a hill in the nearby town of San Francisco de Paula, about seven miles away from Havana. Five minutes outside of Havana by car and you're in a different world all over again. Modern technology assumes an even lower profile. I'd gone alone. A gypsy cab agreed to drive me there and back for five tourist dollars. Letting me inside the home was against the rules—too much to steal and no security cameras—but the staff made an exception after grilling me on some trivia. I was a terrible student who flunked nearly every subject in school, but I'd skipped a lot of classes and spent hundreds of hours in the library reading everything I could get my hands on about Hemingway's work and life.

After the revolution they'd converted Hemingway's home into the Hemingway Museum. Bullfighting posters, animal heads, horns, and antlers were everywhere, but far and away the most dominant feature was the personal library of 8,000 books along with his typewriter. The contents of the bookshelves represented one of the most profound displays of curiosity I'd ever encountered. I saw piles of first editions: Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Mailer, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe—even
The Catcher in the Rye
. I wanted very badly to steal that book. During World War II, not long after the liberation, J. D. Salinger had met Hemingway in Paris. It was a meeting that changed Salinger's life. Salinger had continued to write to Hemingway after the war. Hemingway knew who Holden Caulfield was long before the world did. However interested the world was in Hemingway, his library demonstrated he was even more interested in the world. The great seducers are always suckers. And what I loved about his home was feeling that Hemingway was the biggest sucker who ever lived; the world had never seduced someone so completely. And that mutual seduction put such smiles on the visitors I saw that day.

Everything in the house was left untouched since he'd died. There was alcohol still inside a handful of bottles in the living room lying beside a vast pile of magazines and newspapers he subscribed to. You were surrounded by his passion for bullfighting and the hunt in paintings and trophies hung all around the house. The bathroom had his chicken-scratch handwriting on the wall showing his battle with his weight and high blood pressure over the years. Beside the pool visiting Hollywood starlets like Ava Gardner swam naked in, there was an understated cemetery for his beloved cats and dogs.

Every step I took on his property felt as if he could come back through the door at any moment. It was a little eerie combing so much of a man's life left pristinely as he'd chosen to live it in his adoptive home. Havana's marina had been named after him. Why not? He'd donated the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer to the Cuban people. His Pulitzer had been stolen from the shrine where it was kept near Santiago de Cuba. The staff guarding the house told me that it was eventually returned. Back in Havana, the room where he started writing
For Whom the Bell Tolls
at the Ambos Mundos was roped off. There were old women guarding it who had met him as teenagers. Apparently he wasn't stingy with compliments for pretty girls and they still blushed remembering them.

I'd admired Hemingway's work for a long time, but his effect on so many of the Cubans I spoke with in his adoptive country added a great deal to my appreciation of the man. Cubans by and large are a tremendously respectful people, but they aren't easy to impress. H
é
ctor had shrugged once after mentioning he'd fought around the world for crowds but never
felt
(not heard) anyone respond like his own people. “Everybody deserves to have Havana as a hometown,” I heard again and again.

*   *   *

Alfonso lined up for me a meeting with Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway's former captain of his beloved fishing boat, the
Pilar
, which he kept in Cuba. Nearly half a century after the last novel Hemingway ever saw published in his lifetime found its way into readers' hands in 1952, the inspiration for
The Old Man and the Sea
, Fuentes, with his 103-year-old birthday around the corner, still lived in Cojimar, the tiny fishing village from the story. While Castro was up in the Sierra Maestra, Fuentes supported the revolution by smuggling explosives inside his boat. He still worked for the revolution by speaking with foreigners about his life and friendship with Hemingway. He asked for fifteen dollars from visitors to his home, which he donated to the Cuban government. Fuente's tale of going up against a marlin was Hemingway's comeback after the disastrous reception of his World War II novel,
Across the River and into the Trees
. Critics had savaged the book and relished their ad hominem attacks against Hemingway. The common wisdom was that he was shot as an artist and had become nothing more than a third-rate caricature of a bloated legend.

Hemingway responded by sitting down at his typewriter. After a handful of weeks writing inside his San Francisco de Paula home, he sheepishly approached his wife, Mary, with the pages of his manuscript. She read the book in one sitting and returned to him with tears in her eyes and told him she forgave him for
everything
. For different reasons, others seemed to be able to relate: readers weren't far behind Mary's reaction, snatching up over five million copies of
Life
within two days of the novel being featured in the magazine. Forty-five years later I carried a beaten-up copy across Europe, and in every country men and women would stop me, tap an index finger on the cover, and shake their heads smiling. The critics awarded it the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the following year it was specifically mentioned when Hemingway took home the Nobel Prize in Literature. “All the works of Hemingway,” Fidel Castro once said, “are a defense of human rights.”

Montalvo picked me up outside Trejo, with Alfonso and Lesvanne in the car. Alfonso, who was riding shotgun, winked at me as he took a sip from a twelve-year-old bottle of Havana Club from his left hand while waving with his right, a copy of
Romeo y Julieta
wedged between his fingers. His eyes were bloodshot and his face had a sickly pallor.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Don't look at me like that.” Alfonso laughed. “Get in. Today we have a good day. A very, very good day. So what if I'm already celebrating how you're going to remember this day. I live for days like these.”

As I got into the backseat with Lesvanne, Montalvo rubbed Alfonso's shoulder and we began to drive.

“My friend, celebrating all these days you live for is going to put you in the ground,” Montalvo said.

“I won't live for long anyway. That isn't the point. I leave to go home to a place where everyone reaches old age, and how many really enjoy the life they have? A midlife crisis is the
best
-case scenario. Of all the species on this planet, you know how many expect to live to old age? Only those that reside in captivity. All the rest are eaten when they no longer have enough life to fight.”

“So why don't you move here?” I asked him.

“My favorite thing is to miss my flight from Havana.” Alfonso laughed, reaching back and slapping my knee in the backseat. “I hate leaving this place. Brinicito, do you have any idea how many flights I've missed attempting to leave Havana?”

“It must be a record.” Montalvo shook his head.

“Even now when I can't fuck the pretty girls I always visit, they're still sweet to me. We still have a good time. Life has always been sweet to me. The only cruelty is saying good-bye. Which reminds me—” Alfonso handed his cigar to Montalvo, who whisked away the smoke from his face and held the cigar at arm's length out his window. “Brinicito, I want to give you my card before I forget for after you leave so you can always reach me if you need anything here or there.”

I took the card and put it in my wallet. But of course the next time I tried his number several months later to see if Alfonso wanted to meet in Havana again, he couldn't answer because he was already there, buried in the Col
ó
n cemetery after his liver finally gave out. He'd gotten his wish and never had to say good-bye to Havana ever again.

“After we visit the old man in Cojimar I will show you all the books I am bringing back. It is a crime to part with them, but for the price I'll get I will. eBay has made the life of a bookseller so easy. If I collected baseball cards down here, I'd make a fortune. And, by the way, I have figured out a way to pay for your trip and every trip you make down here. Montalvo can get you several Cuban Olympic tracksuits on the
mercado negro
and you can sell them on eBay to Cuban Americans in Miami. For three hundred dollars apiece, you could sell a handful for fifteen hundred. You get these tracksuits and a couple boxes of Cohibas from the cigar factory, and you've paid off all your airfare and rent. Let me show you just a few books I have with me from this morning. First editions! London's
White Fang
!”

The international book fair in Havana was nearly over and moving on to spread out over the rest of Cuba. Alfonso had cleaned up at the old eighteenth-century Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Caba
ñ
a, where the fair attracted tens of thousands of book lovers and collectors. Even an international book fair in Cuba is a touchy thing (beyond the fact that it is permitted to sell only state-sponsored books). After La Caba
ñ
a was built by the Spanish in 1774, it was used as a military base and prison for the next two centuries. When the rebels seized the fortress in 1959, after Batista's troops surrendered without offering any resistance, Che was installed there for five months to oversee a military prison and revolutionary tribunals, which resulted in extensive executions of informants, Batista's secret police, war criminals, political prisoners, and traitors. These events turned a lot of supporters against the revolutionary agenda. Later on La Caba
ñ
a was converted into a historical park with a few museums and a famous cannon, which explodes across the Havana night at 9 p.m. each evening. Then again, a lot of the prettiest plazas in Madrid where tourists sip coffee were once public execution grounds or impromptu bullfighting rings.