Beautiful Exiles Page 16

  “Look, Bug, this one has a tennis court and a pool,” I said, thrusting the advertisement at Ernest, who looked up from his journal at the Ambos Mundos bar, pencil in one hand and a beer in the other. I wore no stockings, no hat, nothing more than a plain cotton shift that would have scandalized all of St. Louis and the better part of Missouri. But this was Cuba, and as near as I could tell, the Cuba rules had never been drawn up.

  “And a mango grove, Bug,” I said. “It has a mango grove, so we’ll have everything we need.”

  “Except booze and typewriter ribbons,” he said.

  “Except booze and typewriter ribbons,” I agreed.

  He grinned and said, “Well, let’s go see it, then, Daughter.”

  We collected the car and rambled off out of Havana, through the slums on the outskirts of the city and the unbearable stink of a tannery, to banana and coconut farms where children merrily made their way home from school.

  “It’s quite a drive,” Ernest said after what really was just a very few minutes.

  “But it’s quiet and the air is fresh.”

  “Except that awful tannery stink,” he said.

  “But here, Bug. You’d like to write in a place where the air is this fresh, wouldn’t you?”

  San Francisco de Paula, a little town not far from the center of Havana.

  A friend of the owner’s family met us at the front gate and unlocked it, opening the way to a tree-lined drive. Inside the gates, the gardens were crusted over with empty booze bottles and rusted cans. The paint and the tennis court vied for the honor of being the most horrendous, the tennis court really just a fenced-in collection of every variety of weed the little town had to offer. The sludge in the pool was worse than the sludge in my brains had ever been. The place had been built fifty years earlier by a Catalan architect in the wake of the death of his two sons—I was glad to hear the boys hadn’t died there—and it hadn’t been lived in for so long that it was steeped in the smell of rottenness. Inside, the walls were nasty with a hideous black mold.

  “This makes your habits look almost respectable, Bug,” I said.

  But I fell hard for the good of the place: the high ceilings and the abundant doors and windows, the arched passageways and tile floors. From the high ground of the house, you could see all the way to Havana, fifteen miles to the west. Just out the windows and doors, brightly flowered bougainvillea and jacaranda I dubbed “the flamboyantes” even that first day were fighting to pull the garden walls down.

  “Oh, Bug, don’t you love it?” I said.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “The tree at the front steps, though.” A ceiba so beautiful that the natives must have considered it a shrine. “All those orchids growing on its branches like a crowd of exquisite subjects flocking to the plainest of queens . . .” And there were hummingbirds too, and eighteen kinds of mangos. “And the name: Finca Vigía. I only wish the ancient watchtower still stood to climb. Wouldn’t that have been a space where the writing juice would run?”

  “A hundred a month, Stooge? Look at this place, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I am. I am looking closely at it, Ernest Hemingway. And I am falling in love with it.”

  “But a hundred a month!” he repeated.

  “You pay sixty dollars just for your writing room, never mind the rooms you live in.”

  Never mind the $1,000 per month maintenance of his Key West house.

  A hundred a month—I could cover that myself for a while with the money from my Collier’s pieces.

  “I’ll take it,” I told the man showing us the place. “You tell them I’ll take it. Don’t you dare show it to another soul.”

  Havana, Cuba

  FEBRUARY 1939

  “No telephone,” Hemingway insisted.

  “Don’t be silly, Scrooby. What would Matie do if she couldn’t call me?”

  “It will ring us right out of our writing.”

  “It will be my telephone. You needn’t give the number to Pauline.”

  “No radio,” he said.

  “But how would we get the news, Bug?” The US newspapers came by mail boat, which took days.

  I found a painter to whitewash the walls, two gardeners to retrieve the place from the weeds, and a man to drain and clean and refill the pool, trying to make the Finca Vigía habitable while Ernest wrote from his hotel-room office those last weeks of February and into March. He finished “Under the Ridge”—a blatantly anti-war thing in which a correspondent bearing a strong resemblance to Ernest was filming something very like The Spanish Earth—and he turned to another story. He was almost always at the typewriter, and almost never writing by hand, a sure sign that this new story was going well.

  We were sitting together on the bed in his office one afternoon in early March, our legs stretched alongside each other as we read our pages, when I set my manuscript aside and picked up the first page of his. He didn’t object. I read the first few lines. A story set in Spain, in a forest, during the war. Not the one he’d started in Europe, but not so different either: an American fighting with the Republicans in Spain.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, remembering the oiled roads he wrote of, the streams and the mills and the dams, and all the boys who died in Spain, grown boys fighting the war and little boys whose grandmothers held their hands as bombs fell in the streets of Madrid.

  He’d already been revising. He’d struck the first-person plural and penciled in the third personal singular, trading “we” were lying on a forest floor for “he.” I read on, the rest of that page and the second and third, where the original typing switched to the third person.

  “Why do you put a space before the commas and periods and dashes?” I asked, thinking I might never pick up my own sloppy, sludgy pages about the Czechs again.

  “It’s the French way.”

  “Only for two-part punctuation. A semicolon. An exclamation mark.”

  He looked up at me, uncertainty in his brown eyes and furrowed brow. He so hated to be wrong.

  “A Spanish war story,” I said. “A story about the Republican attack on the Fascists in the Guadarrama Mountains? The La Granja attack?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I know how the story ends, then.”

  He didn’t respond.

  I said, “But that was in May.” May of 1937. “After we’d come back to New York for the writers’ conference. You weren’t there.”

  “I have the bombing on the Tortosa road to call on for the sounds and the smells and the rest of it, the details,” he said. “I have all the International Brigades we did meet. It’s easier sometimes to take what you know along to something you need to explore. To write what you almost know rather than what you know too well to truly see.”

  “It’s stunning, Bug,” I said. “It’s a stunning opening.”

  “Do you think so, Mook?”

  I stroked his hair, which was thinning. Gray was creeping into his beard too.

  “The repetition: he lay, he lay, he could see, he could see,” I said. “It oughtn’t be so beautiful, but it’s incantatory. Almost biblical.”

  “I didn’t think I was ready to write it.”

  I set the pages aside, and he did too, and we made love. It was so easy to love him when he wrote like that. I could love a man who wrote like that forever, couldn’t I?

  While I continued organizing the work on the Finca Vigía—picking out paint colors and finding someone to rid the place of the flying white ants that came in the windows to chew up my moldings—Ernest decided it would be a fine time to take a break, and he went off to fish. Before he returned, I’d hired a houseman named Reeves and arranged to restore the tennis court with crushed coral limestone bordered by bamboo. The gardeners had cleared foliage enough that we could see the Havana lights. And Hitler had decided it would be a fine time to take the rest of Czechoslovakia, which he did on March 15—news which, as I’d lost the battle of the radio, we only happened to hear while in town for drinks.
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  I thought I ought to go, but even without the overlord of my new possessions, there was no getting into Czechoslovakia now. I was left to curl up in my new bed in my new home, with Bug and my novel set in Prague that now would have no hope of saving the Czechs even if I could ever make it jell.

  With the work on the Finca Vigía still at full tilt, Ernest decided he ought to go back to Key West for a few weeks to see Bumby, who was coming down for his Easter break.

  “He could come here,” I suggested. “We could have a grand time here.”

  “I have some business to take care of,” Ernest said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Don’t be like that, Mook.”

  “Like what, Bug?”

  He called from Key West several times a day, interrupting the little writing I was getting done between overseeing the house restoration. He called to make sure I’d seen the news that Franco had declared victory in Spain. He called to tell me who had been hired to translate his stories into Russian. He called to tell me Pauline thought “Under the Ridge” was his best story ever—this in a late-night call that left me imagining him and Pauline sitting in bed together, his pages the only thing between them.

  “She says it’s better than ‘Hills like White Elephants’!” he said.

  “How nice that you’re sharing your story with Pauline,” I said, wondering how far Pauline might go to flatter him. Ernest always thought the thing he’d most recently finished was his best ever, but “Under the Ridge” seemed to me to rely too heavily on the reader believing in the hero’s political convictions, which I wasn’t sure Ernest himself believed.

  “Pauline is the best copy editor I know,” he said.

  How very convenient it must be, I thought, for him to have a triple-purpose appliance: copy editor and bed- and ego-warmer all in one.

  “What about the other story, the long one?” I asked. “The La Granja attack one that starts with that amazingly incantatory opening.”

  He’d only just started the thing March 1, but he’d had fifteen thousand words before he’d left for Key West. Fifteen thousand words, and it was the beginning, the hardest place to get them.

  “It’s only begun, and it’s already too long to sell anywhere.”

  “Maybe it’s a novel, Bug.”

  “I can’t afford to write a novel. Anyway, I can’t write anything here, with people coming and going and not a minute to myself.”

  “It would make Max happy to have a new novel from you.”

  “I was a hundred ninety-eight pounds this morning,” he said, calling up the image of him padding barefoot across the wood floor of the bedroom he shared with Pauline to his bathroom overlooking Whitehead Street. It was a measure of his mood, his weight. Under two hundred pounds meant he was happy. Was he happier with Pauline than with me?

  “I’m sure you look awfully fine for Pauline and her Key West horde,” I said.

  “Mookie,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “I’ve been reading Scott’s Tender is the Night,” he said. “It’s amazing how excellent it is.”

  He’d still been here in Cuba when he stumbled on a copy of Scott’s story about a psychiatrist and the patient he marries. I was surprised he’d never read it, given what good friends they’d once been and how closely the book explored the problems in Scott’s own life: the villa in France, the crazy wife, the husband’s turn to alcohol.

  “Do you really think he’s done for writing novels?” I asked, glad of skirting an argument when I was in Cuba and Pauline was with him in Key West.

  “I always had this stupid little-boy feeling of being better than Scott,” Ernest confided. “Like a tough little bully lording it over the sissy.”

  “The very talented sissy.”

  “This Tender is the Night is so good it’s frightening. Reading it makes me want to give up the stories and do a novel again.”

  “You can do that,” I said. “I’m telling you, the new story you’re writing, Robert Jordan at the La Granja attack, it’s a novel. You know it’s a novel.”

  “But I need the damned money.”

  I thought to say I had money, but he hated Pauline’s money—or her uncle Gus’s that they depended on. Ernest’s royalties were substantial, but he seemed to think it was Pauline’s family money that poisoned him, that without it he would chuck the Key West mansion and the fancy parties and he would be a better writer and a better person in the bargain. I didn’t want him to hate even the little money I had compared to Pauline. And I supposed the only thing worse than being dependent on him was having him dependent on me.

  “Max could give you an advance,” I suggested. “Tell him you’re working on a novel.”

  “I can’t make the dough as fast as Pauline spends it. I need to sell the stories for the money. I ought to go to Hollywood and write crap for the money, like Scott does.”

  “Come back to Cuba, Bongie.”

  “This place is overrun with tourists thanks to that damned new road,” he said. “The fishermen here are no longer anything more than props to photograph.”

  “The visitors are looking for the rumrunner and the thugs from To Have and Have Not, and for you, Bug. Ah, but for the days when no one could get to Key West except in private yachts!”

  He laughed—at himself, or at Pauline’s money, or both.

  “Come wake to the birds in the ceiba tree and the flamboyantes out the window, Bug. Fall asleep to the wind rattling the palms. It’s quiet here now. Quiet and bare and clean and empty. I swam in the pool today. I just stripped off my clothes right on the patio and dove in.”

  Yes, I knew what he liked. I knew what Pauline couldn’t offer with the children there, although Pauline was a smart girl, she might manage things awfully well after the children went to bed.

  “In broad daylight,” I said. “The sun warm on my bare shoulders and legs, on my bare bum.”

  When Ernest returned to Cuba, he brought the Pilar with him, and although he kept his hotel rooms in Havana and his wife, he woke in my bed at the Finca Vigía, in a room that was bright with yellow tiles and southern light. He woke that first morning at sunrise, and he went straight to his medical scale—one I’d had delivered while he was in Key West because I knew he liked to weigh himself every morning. I watched in horror as he noted his weight in pencil right there on my newly painted bathroom wall, at shoulder level where the tile gave way to fresh paint.

  “What the hell, Nesto! The damned wall isn’t even dry!”

  “But it’s only pencil, Stooge,” he said, smiling a goofy smile that wasn’t exactly an apology. “You might worry when I start using pen. That will mean it’s gotten awfully hard to get rid of me.”

  I smiled. I could smile. He’d brought the Pilar to Cuba.

  “I’ll pay for this,” he said.

  “For the damage to my wall?”

  “And the rest of it. Even your houseman.”

  “I can take care of myself,” I said. “And Reeves as well.” The responsibility for my own keep brought with it the need to write, to earn a living, and I liked that. I liked having the absolute right to keep my career when Ernest might have me set it aside to tend to him.

  “We’ll split the expenses, then,” he said.

  “But you have your room rent.”

  “I’ll let the rooms go.”

  I wondered what he would do about an address for Pauline and the boys to write to, but I supposed he could arrange to continue collecting his mail at the hotel.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll split the expenses.”

  “Fifty-fifty, except my booze,” he said. “I’m the master of my own booze, and I won’t be negotiating it with anyone.”

  “Fifty-fifty, except for your booze,” I agreed.

  “It’s settled, then, Mook,” he said, and he put his typewriter on the desk right there in my bedroom—in our bedroom—and he pulled on a pair of pants and, still bare-chested, he rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the carri
age.

  “And maybe you ought to pay for your own typewriter ribbon and paper, along with the booze,” I said. “I don’t know if I can afford to subsidize anyone writing as damned fast as you are.”

  He said, “Write faster, then, Daughter,” and he began his two-fingered peck at the typewriter keys.

  Ernest was as useful around the house as a stuffed rabbit in those early days, leaving me to finish all the purchasing of comfortable chairs and good, strong reading lamps, garden benches, the mixings for Papa Dobles and the glasses to serve them in, which I found finally at the ten-cent store along with plates and linens (table and bed). He left me to hire the cook and the maid, and to show them how, exactly, he liked everything. But he was writing so beautifully that I couldn’t bear to suggest he do anything else.

  I settled in to writing my journalist-in-Prague novel too, sometimes outside in the bamboo grove or on the bougainvillea-covered terrace, where I thought perhaps I ought to hang a plaque thanking Collier’s for its donation to provide me this paradise. I set up an office in a second bedroom off the east end of the living room, with a view only of a courtyard where pigeons liked to gather, a room to which we eventually moved our huge double bed since I was the later sleeper. I remembered the first place I’d called my own, for four dollars a week when I was a cub reporter back in Albany. It felt shameful to be so well off in such a ruined world, but I consoled myself that soon enough my money would run out and I’d have to set off to cover the misery again.

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  APRIL 1939

  The Spanish war story Ernest had started just before he left for Key West—the La Granja attack story with the incantatory opening—consumed him. At the end of each day, he counted his words and shared his progress: five hundred words or more. Me, I was dizzy and ill just vomiting out a few words a day, fighting off abandoning the book only with thoughts of the poor Czechs now enduring Nazi boot prints not just in the Sudetenland but all over all their lovely earth, Hitler’s thugs having taken Prague in mid-March and the vile little man proclaiming his greatness from the very castle where I’d flirted with Mikhail Koltsov. I had none of the magic Ernest did. Each night I read his pages, words as clear as water and carrying like the music in a story so moving that it made me want to toss my own pages into the sea.