by Norman Lewis
In the few days I had been in Santiago, warlike activity had recommenced. From the roof of the hotel in Cespedes Square, the night sparkled distantly where Castro partisans had gone into the cane-fields, to plant candles with their bases wrapped in paraffin-soaked rags. There was gun-play every night, usually when revolutionaries took on the police, but on one occasion when Castro’s 26th July Movement and the Communists decided on a shoot-out. By custom, the first shots were fired precisely at 10 p.m., giving the citizens the chance of a quiet stroll in the cool of the evening before the bullets began to fly. With a half-hour to go, and all the street lights ablaze, the promenaders began to stream out of the square and make for their homes, where they clustered at their doors like gophers ready to bolt for the shelter of their burrows when the shadow of an eagle fell upon them. Then, as the cathedral clock struck ten all the lights went out, and the streets were cleared for battle.
Back in Havana a call came through from Ian Fleming in London. We had made a loose arrangement for a meeting in Jamaica, but there was a change in dates. He asked how things were going, and I told him fairly well, adding that there was not a lot more to be done.
‘Have you talked to the Big Man?’ he wanted to know.
By this I understood that he meant not the President, but Hemingway. I told him that Hemingway had been ill, adding that Scott did not seem to feel that a meeting would be specially rewarding.
‘Never mind Scott,’ Fleming said. ‘Do your best to see him.’
I assured him that I would, and Fleming said that he had just read The Old Man and the Sea, again, and had found it even better on second reading. He had the book open by the phone, and proceeded to read out a fairly long passage that he had found of special appeal.
A letter arrived from Hemingway next morning. It was neatly handwritten and formal in tone. He said he would be happy to see me at his farm, La Vigia, on the outskirts of the city, and would send his car to pick me up, suggesting the next afternoon for the visit.
Hemingway’s concern for his privacy was in strong evidence at his farm, the roof of the building being screened by a high fence, with a gate secured by a chain and an enormous padlock. The driver got out to unlock the padlock, drove the car through the gate, then stopped to go back and chain and lock the gate again. I was ushered into a large room, furnished in the main with bookshelves, where I found Hemingway, in his pyjamas, seated on his bed. He pulled himself to his feet to mumble a lacklustre welcome.
I was stunned by his appearance. At sixty years of age he looked like a man well into his seventies, and he was in wretched physical shape. He moved slowly under the great weight of his body to find the drinks, pouring himself, to my astonishment, a tumblerful of Dubonnet, half of which he immediately gulped down. Above all, it was his expression that shocked, for there was exhaustion and emptiness in his face. This was an encounter that might have been dangerous and undermining to any young man in the full enjoyment of ambition and hope, because it presented a parable on the subject of futility. Hemingway’s mournful eyes urged you to accept your lot as it was, and be thankful for it.
Some people, and Fleming and I were among them, regarded this man as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and at this time, three years after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, he had only just overtopped the pinnacle of his fame. He was a man who had gained all that life had to offer. He had crammed himself with every satisfaction, driven his body to the utmost, loved so many women, dominated so many men, hunted so many splendid animals. It was hard to believe that anything Hemingway had set out to do he had left unachieved. Yet after all his conquests he seemed ready to weep with Alexander, and, looking into his face, it was hard to believe that he would ever smile again.
We talked in a desultory and spiritless fashion, and it was Hemingway who brought up the subject of his publishers, showing little affection for them, but ready with criticism. He found them parsimonious, nervous of spending money on publicity, and this, he said, had had an adverse affect on the sales of his books in Great Britain, which were disappointing compared with those in the United States. He disliked the dust-jacket of the English edition of The Old Man and the Sea. A leading artist had been commissioned at great expense to produce the American version, which he showed me, and it had to be admitted that it was attractive enough to increase sales.
The release of this unexpected grain of information about his literary affairs led to my undoing. It seemed, mistakenly, to open a suitable opportunity – although Jonathan Cape had warned me that this was a topic to be approached with extreme caution – to mention that his publishers were eager to know whether anything new from him could be expected in the near future. The reaction was instant and hostile. A wasted and watery eye swivelled to watch me with anger and suspicion. What had I come for? What was it I wanted of him. In the coldest manner he asked, ‘Is this an interview?’ and I hastened to reassure him that it was not.
There was something in this scene with the faint remembered flavour of an episode in For Whom the Bell Tolls, featuring Massart, ‘one of France’s great modern revolutionary figures’, now Chief Commissar of the International Brigade, a ‘symbol man’ who cannot be touched, and has come with time to believe only in the reality of betrayals. With infallible discernment Hemingway had described this great old man’s descent into pettiness; and now I was amazed that a writer who had understood how greatness could be pulled down by the wolves of weakness and old age, should – as it appeared to me – have been unable to prevent himself from falling into this trap.
Suddenly the talk was of Scott, and there was a note of harsh interrogation. Did I know him well, and had I heard about the challenge? I admitted that I had. I added quite sincerely that I regarded it as childish and absurd.
He seemed appeased, almost amicable. ‘Take a look at this,’ he said. He put in front of me a copy of a letter he had sent to the Havana Post. In this, couched in the most conciliatory language, he had taken note of the challenge to a duel made by its Editor, Edward Scott. This he had decided not to take up, in the belief that he owed it to his readers not to jeopardise his life in this way.
I nodded approval. It was the best thing in the circumstances that he could have done. For all that I was surprised, and in some way disappointed at the wording of the letter, as I felt that his readers might have been left out of it.
The problem now was how Fleming’s demands – seeming more eccentric with every minute that passed – were to be satisfied. And yet Hemingway’s opinions on Cuba ought to have been worth listening to. He had gone there in search of ‘pay-dirt’ for his post-war fiction many years before, and remembering his passionate involvement in the Spanish Civil War and in the politics of those days, it was hard to believe that suddenly he had torn himself free from all involvement with his times and that Cuba for him was nothing but a tropical setting for the pursuit of visiting film actresses and gigantic fish. He downed another half-pint of Dubonnet, yawned, and I got up to go. He followed me to the waiting car. All his anger had passed and I imagine that he felt little but boredom. ‘A final word of advice,’ he said. ‘As soon as you get back to the hotel, I’d change that shirt.’
The shirt was a khaki affair, with convenient buttoning pockets of the kind it was hard to find in London at that time, and I had picked it up in an army-surplus shop in Oxford Street. ‘By their standards that’s a uniform,’ he said. ‘You could find yourself in a whole heap of trouble.’
I pointed out that I was wearing seersucker trousers with the shirt. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’s still a uniform the way they see it, and they make the laws. A lot of cops on this island with itchy trigger-fingers. They have a rebellion on their hands.’
There was nothing to be lost. I took the plunge. ‘How do you see all this ending?’ I said. Comrade Massart’s cautious, watery, doubting eyes were on me again. ‘My answer to that is I live here,’ Hemingway said. In my letter to Fleming I wrote, ‘Finally I saw the Great Man,
as instructed. He told me nothing, but taught me a lot.’
19
The Bandits of Orgosolo
TOWARDS the end of October 1962, Edmund and Vera Townley, a middle-aged British couple on holiday from Kenya, who were making their way back to England by easy stages, arrived in Sardinia. Edmund Townley was employed by an import-export firm in Nakuru as well as possessing a half interest in an apiary which was doing well. He was also a notable jack-of-all-trades, who had been farmer, miner, and road-engineer in turn, as well as a bit of an amateur detective. The Townleys were regarded as a quiet couple, who didn’t go out much, happy in their home life. They were a good-looking pair, and Vera had once been almost beautiful with strong, classic features. Edmund has been described by those close to him as being capable sometimes of aggressiveness and he was outstandingly devoid of physical fear.
While the life of the Kenya highlands suited them very well on the whole, they were both uneasy about the prospects for European settlers in independent Kenya. In Edmund Townley’s case, there was some special additional motive for nervousness. He had been actively involved in the Mau Mau emergency, both officially as a screening officer, and as a private individual organising his own information network which had been responsible for the capture and death of several terrorists. Now he had learned that his name was on the ultranationalists’ blacklist. This holiday, therefore, was to serve a double purpose. On the way home, the Townleys decided to visit the Mediterranean, and in particular Italy, with the idea perhaps eventually of buying land there for their retirement. Like so many Britons in their situation who have passed the active years of their lives under the African sun, they found it hard to believe that they could reconcile themselves to the climate of their native land.
The Townleys had always enjoyed pioneering, and now they were on the look-out for a place where they could start from scratch once again, clear a piece of land and start a beekeeping project. They had nearly settled for the Canary Islands, but as Mrs Townley spoke fluent Italian, it seemed more sensible to settle in a place where this could be put to use. Sardinia seemed the next best choice, and here, at least, there would be no language problem while, from their first enquiries, all the other natural advantages they hoped to find in their new homeland seemed to be present.
Sardinia, indeed, had a great deal to offer. In spite of the Aga Khan’s luxurious settlement near Olbia in the north, the country was largely undiscovered by tourists, and land prices had not begun to soar as they had elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Nor so far had the coastline been disfigured by chaotic development projects, as for example had the Costa del Sol in Spain. The cost of living was substantially less than on the Italian mainland, the beaches were the finest in the Mediterranean, domestic help was cheap and plentiful, the people charming and hospitable, and the towns clean – some of them built round a core of noble architecture. This was a land, in fact, possessing all the warmth and geniality of Italy, minus slums, smells and noise. If anything more was asked of it, it was an archaeologist’s paradise, littered with dolmens, prehistoric ‘giants’ tombs’, nuraghi (only one out of 7,000 scientifically excavated), Punic cemeteries, shrines to the gods of Carthage and Rome, and rocks bearing mysterious inscriptions.
The Townleys planned to spend two weeks touring Sardinia, and, having flown from Rome to Sassari, they hired a Fiat car and set out for the interior. Ten days later, they arrived in Nuoro which is roughly in the centre of the island. Here they were in the foothills of the Barbagia – some of the wildest and least-known mountains in Europe. Sardinia is an island, but it is also a country in its own right, and it is big enough – one hundred and seventy miles in length from north to south – to possess real rivers and impressive mountain scenery. The sense of confinement, and in the end the claustrophobia of the small island, does not exist in Sardinia. Looking southwards from the window of their hotel room the Townleys might have imagined themselves confronted once again by a vast African horizon, although not so much the Africa of their own green highlands of Kenya as the Africa to the far north of their home on the barren frontiers of Ethiopia.
Nuoro has many attractions for the discerning tourist. It has stood apart from this century, a leisurely introspective town built in a graceful but haphazard fashion on the lower slopes of the sugar-loaf mountain of Ortobene. It is supremely Sardinian, and women in from the country still walk its streets in the bold flamboyant folk-costumes inherited from the Middle Ages. Official brochures claim the view from the top of Ortobene to be the most striking in Europe. In fact, one looks out across a wide valley at an awe-inspiring recession of granite plateaux and peaks: a glittering hallucinatory whiteness where the sun striking the hard rock-surfaces counterfeits glaciers and snowfields. These are the mountains of the Barbagia – the word is from the same root as ‘barbarian’. They are only 5,000 feet high, but almost as remote to humanity as the Himalayan peaks, and they are the last refuge of some of Europe’s rarest animals, including a species of pygmy wild boar, as well as the indigenous home of the moufflon, elsewhere extinct. Insani Montes – the dangerous mountains – Diodorus of Sicily called them in the atlas he made of Sardinia in the first century bc. There has been no time in recorded history when outlaws have not roamed the Barbagia, and they are still as inaccessible to the prudent as they were when the Carthaginian, the Roman, and the Aragonese generals set up their outposts on the further side of this valley of Nuoro, and went no further.
The Townleys stayed the night at the Jolly Hotel, one of an Italian chain set up throughout the country to relieve the asperities of tourism in such provincial towns. In the morning, they told the receptionist that they would be keeping their room again that night, but as it was a fine warm day, had decided to go for a drive in the country. They asked for and were given packed lunches.
Leaving Nuoro, they followed the main highway for five miles in the direction of Orosei, and then turned off into the narrow, winding and deserted road that leads to Orgosolo. Whether they knew it or not, the British tourists were now entering a most remarkable area. After two or three miles, the road passes through Oliena. Next comes Orgosolo where, barred by the mountain of Supramonte, the road loops away to the right to join the main Nuoro-Cagliari road five miles further on. The population of these small sad towns and of the mountains behind them are the descendants of Nomadic hunters that peopled Sardinia in prehistory. Of Orgosolo, Franco Cagnetta, the Italian social historian, had written, ‘Here life is essentially unchanged after thousands of years; one is at the centre – all the more astonishing because the centre itself does not realise it – of a civilisation that is infinitely retarded; that has inexplicably survived. This is the most archaic community of the whole of Italy – perhaps of the Mediterranean basin.’ As the people, so the landscape that has in part formed them. The mountain of Supramonte, which blocks the horizon south of Orgosolo like some flat-topped iceberg, is the bed of the sea thrown up by a cataclysm of 100 million years ago; its surface strewn with rocks gouged by the wind into fantastic shapes. The mountain has been hollowed out by vanished rivers, there are fissures a half-mile deep, vast unexplored caves, primeval forests of chestnut and oak, and the ruins of nuragic villages visited only by armed shepherds. The visitor to these parts from the outside world is warned not to leave the road, for this is the traditional stronghold of the bandit and of the vendetta.
Orgosolo, too, with its aroma of immeasurable antiquity has something to detain the traveller. In the greyness and the ugliness of its streets, one still sees figures from pre-history: old men in the stocking caps of the bronzes of the nuragic period of 1000 bc; an occasional shepherd carrying the triple reed-pipes depicted in the same bronzes. Sixty years ago, the whole town was built of fughiles, the most ancient of stone habitations consisting of a single circular windowless room (in which it was impossible to stand upright) and a hole in the roof to let out the smoke of the fire burning in the centre of the floor. A few fughiles still exist even if they are disguised these days be
hind the façades of normal houses. Students of folklore find Orgosolo of extreme interest, and the high spot of any celebration is the apparition of the mamutones, the ancestral spirits, in sheepskins and tragic masks carved in wood, transporting the onlooker into an eerie animistic world that lurks here in the shadows behind a perfunctory stage-setting of Christianity.
The invisible life of the community is as singular. Nothing but lip-service has ever been offered to the state, and the only laws respected are the ancient customs codified in the Carta de Logu of 1388, on the eve of the extinction of a thousand years of Sardinian independence. Never since the overthrow of the rule of the Sardinian judges by the Kingdom of Aragon has the presence of authority possessed legal validity in the eyes of Orgosolo, which initiated nearly 600 years ago perhaps the longest resistance-movement in human history. Within the provisions of the famous Carta are laid down in minute detail the rules for the conduct of the vendetta. Orgosolo’s only building of significance is the Church of San Leonardo with the famous churchyard and its row after row of small wooden crosses marking the graves of men who have met tragic deaths. It has been stated in the Italian press that of a population of 4,500, over 500 men have died through the vendetta since the war alone. By local standards, none of these killings have been crimes: at the most, they are the malefic links in a chain of cause and effect, the payment of debts of blood, the almost mechanical retributions decreed by a revengeful Stone Age Jehovah.
