Pursuing Papa's Marlin

The manic rhythm of a steel drum chopped through the chatter. A dark, thin old man, shirtless and wild-eyed, danced and spun as he pounded the drum. This was, I learned, El Indio Tatuado (the Tattooed Indian), a character from nearby Guanabacoa who shows up every year to strut his stuff at the Hemingway. When he saw me looking at him, the Indian pushed through the crowd and grabbed my hand. Grinning toothlessly, his eyes wide with something beyond mirth, he rubbed my hand on his bald forehead and spoke in a language that was not Spanish. From head to toe his smooth, mahogany-dark skin was covered with art—cabalistic symbols, totemic designs, naked ladies, stars and moons and planets, serpents and full-rigged barkentines, wolves, bears, a dragon breathing fire, a heart pierced by an arrow. Then the pounding of the steel drum resumed, and he whirled off into the crowd, his picture gallery bulging and writhing to the play of his muscles under the hot sun.

As the four o'clock deadline for the end of the tournament approached, the fish rack slowly filled—small marlin, whites mainly, and a single sailfish along with a few dolphin. They turned slowly on their roped tails, heads down, flies crawling on their glazed, unlidded eyes. The skins, whose colors in life Hemingway had so often admired—the marlin's electric-lavender stripes against fiery silver, the golden gleam of the dolphin flashing like a rainbow in death, green, blue, red, then back to gold—had all faded to a uniform gray-black, without sheen, like so many hunks of worn-out truck tire.

There was no fish here to compare with Gonzalez Arazo's 248-pound blue marlin caught on the opening day, the day of storm and heavy seas. His team's 1,230 points held up against a last-minute, three-marlin onslaught by the Department of Tourism team, good for 1,040 points and second place. Pepe Milera looked up from his seat at the judge's table and watched the last fish of the day, a small white marlin of about 30 pounds, being hung on the crossbeam. "Robert," he said with a wink, "we are icing down the fresh baits."

On the morning of our departure, we drove out with Captain Gil to visit the Hemingway museum at San Francisco de Paula. The old Carretera del Norte, the coastal highway from Havana to San Francisco, is now potholed in places as badly as New York City's roadways. Big-shouldered Russian trucks and East German buses grumbled and ground their gears bumper to bumper. A choking miasma of diesel smoke dimmed the bright sunlight and stung the eyes—flashes of L.A. freeways during rush hour. Beside the road a heavyset woman with fire in her eyes stood glaring at the speeding traffic, clutching a squashed chicken in her left hand while she shook her other fist at the trucks.

The Museo Hemingway was temporarily closed for renovation, but the gate guard, an old man with steel-rimmed glasses and a potbelly pushing incongruously through the obligatory Castro-green fatigues, let us in anyway. Just beyond the gate, up on blocks, stood the Pilar. Her black hull looked faded and dead, like the hides of the dead marlin hanging from the crossbeam at Coj�mar. The grounds were green and cool under the lush tropical plantings, and the potholed driveway wound uphill past flowering frangipani. Workmen plied their trowels over the broad front stairway, cementing cracks and sags. The huge ceiba tree at the right front corner facing the house, the tree under which Hemingway and Mary used to sing folksongs in many languages and drink the evenings away, had been heavily pruned, but the gnarled gray mass of its thick trunk was still impressive, like the glimpse of an old wounded elephant standing silent, waiting, in the thornbush.

Inside the front door the house opened out into enormous rooms, cool behind their thick stucco walls, the air faintly musty like the air of a mausoleum. But as one's eyes adjusted to the indoor dimness, the rooms gradually began to fill with remnants of a life. From the high-ceilinged walls stared the heads of big-game animals—two splendid oryxes, an enormous elk rack, a good kudu, the full-head mount of a fair-to-middling Cape buffalo plus the skulls and horns of two others that had to go over 50 inches in spread. A leopard skin lay draped over a couch. On the walls were 1930 bullfight posters from Spain. A 6.5-mm. Mannlicher-Schoenauer rifle leaned in a corner, its full-fore-ended walnut stock gleaming cool and smooth in the dim light, the bluing worn from its well-oiled barrel and bolt. And books, books, everywhere books.

When the Hemingways left 17 years earlier, they did not know that they would never return together, not even as visitors. In donating the house and all its contents to the new Cuban government, Mary Hemingway left behind some 8,000 volumes—books Ernest had collected and read during his career, many of them autographed first editions. The titles reflected the broad range of his interests—from how-to-do-it volumes on cockfighting and winemaking to Ezra Pound's Cantos, from works by African explorers to Frans Bengtsson's excellent novel of Viking life, The Long Ships. Anyone with a feel for books and reading would not mind being imprisoned in this house. A five-year sentence would be about right.

In the office just off the main bedroom, under the frozen glare of a Cape buffalo, Hemingway's desk stands, replete with old photographs from World War II, newspaper clippings, the memorabilia and clutter of a working writer's sanctum. On a shelf just across from the desk, under a collection of knives, stand a few pairs of the great man's shoes. The shoes are enormous. You could fill one of the broad-toed Weejuns with a quart of Gordon's gin and still have room left for plenty of tonic. On other shelves elsewhere in the house lie a plethora of found objects—sea-fans faded from purple to pale pink, shells, rocks, bones, skulls.

The saddest memento, though, is the bar. On it stand bottles of gin, vodka, whisky, vermouth, Campari—all previously opened, their contents evaporated over the years since Hemingway's hasty departure, so that now all that remains is a thick, gluey sediment, a sludge of the firewater that was for so many years Hemingway's personal fuel.

So that is Finca Vig�a (Lookout Farm), where Hemingway lived some of his happiest years. The master is still present, just as he was at the fishing tournament. His ghost stares down through the glass eyes of the trophies, radiates from the worn spines of the books, glints from the steel of the rifle barrel and the sharp-honed edges of the knives. Most of all it stands, big-footed and warmhearted, in the cool shadow of the giant ceiba tree.