Hemingway Adventure (1999)

by Michael Palin

  Abdul frowns in concentration.

  ‘He came running towards us. His hair was on fire and he was crying.’

  Abdul beckons us to follow him through the yellowing grass to a point beneath a solitary goblet-shaped cactus tree they call a euphorbia. This is where the plane came down and this is where Abdul found pieces of the wreckage, some of which he has kept. He shows me parts of a cylinder, a battery and torn shreds of fuselage fabric. I ask him if anyone has ever shown any interest in these relics of one of Hemingway’s most serious accidents. He shakes his head. No one has been out here.

  I look around. The wind-direction arrow squeaks and read-justs itself, the only landmark in the featureless bush. It’s hard to think that anything important ever happened here.

  Hemingway’s survival of two consecutive air crashes was news across the world, and generally the cause of much rejoicing. But it had come at considerable cost. Writing to Harvey Breit ten days later Hemingway assessed the damage.

  I ruptured the kidneys, or maybe only one, the liver, the spleen (whoever she is) had the brain fluid ooze out to soak the pillow every night, burnt the top of the scalp off, etc. Also … had to take two breathes in the fire which is something that never really helped anybody except of course Joan Of Arc.

  He didn’t mention the sprained arm and leg and the crushed vertebrae and the paralysed sphincter and the temporary loss of hearing and eyesight.

  We return to Masindi. Maybe it’s hearing the story of the crash that has darkened my mood, but I begin to notice the crueller side of life out here. Scrawled on the door of a house just outside the town is a slash of civil war graffiti. ‘Bondo Killers Boys’, it reads, ‘No Living - Child Rat Dog.’

  That night a man comes to see me. He is called Ibrahim Bilal and he wears a pink knitted hat and sports a single very prominent white tooth. He and his friend speak Arabic. He worked for Ugandan Railways and remembers being sent from Kampala, the Ugandan capital, to Butiaba in January of 1954 to bring back an important group of Americans, one of whom was badly hurt.

  He drove them back to Kampala in a Ford Zephyr staff car, with room for seven people, with a Ugandan, Dr Cabreta, in attendance. One of the men lay on a mattress in the back. Yes, Ibrahim remembers, he was in a serious condition.

  ‘Some of the time he was in agony.’

  Appallingly enough, Africa had not finished with Hemingway. A couple of weeks later, recovering at a camp on the Kenya coast at Shimoni, he tried to help deal with a bush-fire nearby and fell into the flames. He suffered second and third degree burns.

  We leave Entebbe for London tomorrow. The bad weather has cleared, the oppressive humidity lifted and, after bone-rattling rides through the bush, the pool at the Lake Victoria Hotel looks inviting.

  Though we’ve not been here long it seems like a lifetime. Africa has a way of imposing its own time scale, reducing our busy western lives to its own pace, its own stately rhythm. In Africa the concept of the eternal seems much more meaningful. It also allows you more time to take things in. Events become clearer and impressions sharper and memories more indelible.

  Perhaps that’s the way it was for Hemingway. He spent less than ten months of his life in Africa and yet from it came two books (one, admittedly, posthumous) and two of his greatest short stories - ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’.

  Life in Key West and Cuba may have been safer, but never as intense.

  CUBA

  On 28 March 1928, Hemingway wrote to his new wife Pauline from the Royal Mail steam packet Orita, westbound from La Rochelle:

  ‘We are five or ten days out on our trip or tripe to Cuba … I have often wondered what I should do with the rest of my life and now I know - I shall try and reach Cuba.’

  Though the letter was mainly a moan about the slow progress and lack of creature comforts aboard the Orita it was oddly prescient. Twelve years later, with the help of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife, Hemingway bought a house in a village on the outskirts of Havana in which he lived for the next twenty years - the most permanent home of his life.

  I’d never been to Cuba until Hemingway lured me there in August and September, the hottest months of the year and the start of the hurricane season.

  At Jose Marti International Airport, Havana, jets are climbing into the sky above the gleaming facade of the brand new air-conditioned terminal but I’m in the car park, where the unconditioned air is 34 degrees centigrade and I’m leaning up against the side of a truck for some shade.

  My bags are in the taxi, whose back axle is hoisted up on one side whilst our driver struggles to replace a flat tyre. The vehicle looks undignified, like a dog with its leg up.

  If I’d wanted to get an instant flavour of what Havana was like in Hemingway’s time, they could not have done much better than finding me this beleaguered but handsome tangerine Plymouth, which dates from 1951 - the year he was writing The Old Man and the Sea. Even if it does have a 1960s Russian engine.

  When we eventually hit the road and turn on to a wide, empty highway outside the airport, almost the first thing I see is a faded billboard advertising the Floridita bar, with Hemingway’s countenance sending out a broad, if unconvincing, smile of welcome.

  I sink back into the leather seat with a delicious feeling of anticipation. It doesn’t last long. Half-way into Havana we hit the road again, only literally this time. There is a dull thud from under my seat and the Plymouth lurches painfully as the replacement tyre explodes, and the car slews round on its wheel rim before coming to a halt beside an embarrassingly crowded bus stop.

  No one bats an eyelid. Not a hint of amusement, concern or even mild derision. It must happen all the time. The bus, which arrives a moment later, completely ignoring a tangerine Plymouth facing the wrong way, in the middle of the road, is unlike any form of public transport I’ve ever seen.

  It’s an articulated hut for people, about fifty foot long with both ends higher than the middle - hence, I suppose, the local name for them - camels. With a belch of black smoke, the tractor unit hauls it away leaving us with the prospect of trying to reach Havana on three wheels.

  No tyre is to be found, so I unload into another taxi, this time a slightly more modern ‘57 Chevy and, fingers crossed, proceed towards Havana.

  Old Havana, close to the port and the sturdy Spanish colonial forts and palaces, is lively and picturesque and being slowly, carefully and beautifully restored. Which is a pity, as the mottled and peeling facades seem much closer to the spirit of this hot, steamy, hard-pressed city.

  It’s not difficult to pick up the Hemingway trail. Its epicentre is the Ambos Mundos Hotel, on the corner of Obispo and Mercaderes in the heart of the old city. On the wall are two plaques - one commemorating the frequent residence of Ernest H., who stayed here on numerous bachelor trips in the thirties, and the other dedicated to one George Washington Halsey who established the first daguerreotype photo studio in Cuba on this spot.

  I’d never heard of him. Which must be the fate of many who share a wall with Ernest Miller Hemingway.

  On the fifth floor of the Ambos Mundos Hotel is the room in which Hemingway reputedly began work on For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1939. (Michael Reynolds, one of his biographers, disputes this, saying that Hemingway was so famous by then that he used the Ambos Mundos as a public front, and actually double-booked a room in the Sevilla-Biltmore to give him space and peace for writing.)

  Whatever the truth, I prefer to think that it was in Room 511 of the Ambos Mundos that Hemingway wrote the words that firmly established him in the post-coital lexicon by having Robert Jordan ask Maria, ‘But did thee feel the earth move?’ Maybe it’s just because I’m a romantic and I’m right next door, in Room 509.

  My good Cuban escort who is called Ernesto, but prefers the Beatles to bullfights, takes me to a small bar called the Bodeguita del Medio, on the grounds that it’s old, established, traditional and noisy enough to anaesthetise jet lag.

  The sp
eciality of the house is mojito - a mix of rum, lime-juice, sugar, mint and ice - which is sharp and refreshing and agreeably addictive. There is a band playing in the tiny, breathless space, urging awkward foreigners into that state of constant rhythmic gyration that seems the natural state of most Cubans.

  Fighting my way up to the bar, I’m rewarded not just by finding chicharrones - the best pork scratchings this side of Huddersfield - but also an endorsement of this establishment by one of the great barflies of our century. There, above the bottles, is written, in the now familiar curly script: ‘My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita. Ernest Hemingway.’

  Less eminent literary tributes are scrawled over every spare inch of the interior, including the bar and the bar stools. Someone has even managed to reach a seemingly inaccessible position twenty feet up on the wall, only to leave the frankly disappointing contribution, ‘Geoff, You Fat Bastard.’

  Later, in a Biblical upper room above the bar, its open balcony tempting in the faintest trace of a breeze, I sample my first Cuban meal. The roast pork is hardly exotic but the deep fried slices they call smashed bananas, the crispy sweet potatoes and a combination of black beans and rice known as moriscos - Moors and Christians - are unfamiliar, and very acceptable.

  By the time I return to Room 509 at the Ambos Mundos, I have quite forgotten how I got here and where it was that my journey began twenty-three hours ago. Pretty soon, I can hear the trumpets of the bullfight, high-pitched laughter, and the clatter of typewriter keys from the room next door.

  I’m into my first Cuban dream.

  As I fumble for my room key a woman with long legs and golden hair passes by and goes into Hemingway’s room. Even beyond the grave, his sexual magnetism hasn’t deserted him.

  Later, after a thin breakfast, but a great view, on the roof of the hotel, I realise that I too can visit Hemingway’s room, for two dollars.

  There isn’t a lot there. Esperanza, the woman with long legs and golden hair who looks after the room, points out the bed in its alcove. It isn’t actually the bed, but the Art Deco lampshade above it is the lampshade beneath which Hemingway lay - and which he must have seen flying around the ceiling after many a night out.

  In the centre of the room is an ancient Royal typewriter, entombed beneath a Perspex cover like the relic of some long-dead saint. Esperanza’s high heels click across the cool, tiled floor as she goes to the window and pulls it open, admitting a suffocating fug of warm, stale air and revealing The Famous View.

  ‘The rooms on the north-east corner of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana’, wrote Hemingway in Esquire in 1933:

  … look out, to the north, over the old cathedral [they still do], the entrance to the harbour [yes], and the sea [not quite, an ugly modern block with yellow plastic water tanks has gone up since then], and to the east to Casablanca peninsula, the roofs of all houses in between and the width of the harbour. [With its long line of Spanish fortifications, that view can’t have changed much since the beginning of the seventeenth century.] If you sleep with your feet toward the east … the sun, coming up over the Casablanca side and into your open window will shine on your face and wake you no matter where you were the night before.

  That’s one thing I admire about Hemingway, he was never a hangover bore. He never let the night before spoil his enjoyment of the morning after.

  Esperanza closes the window of Room 511 and apologises for the lack of memorabilia. His size 11 boots, some of his coats and a pair of his spectacles were here once but the people from the Hemingway museum at San Francisco de Paula took them away.

  The village of San Francisco de Paula stands on a hill nine miles south of the city. It is not one of the smart suburbs of Havana, but then the Ambos Mundos was not one of Havana’s smartest hotels.

  As Hemingway got older, he may have enjoyed the kudos of being wined and dined by those who lived in commodious villas but, as a writer, his inclination was to live closer to the common people.

  The approach to the gates of his house, Finca Vigia (‘Lookout Farm’) is off a rowdy main road whose bars, including El Brillante, once patronised by Hemingway, are now hard and basic drinking sheds. The short street that leads to the Finca is lined on both sides with modest wooden houses and cannot have changed much since Hemingway’s time. The front of one of these houses has literally just fallen apart and as I walk by quite a crowd has gathered.

  Everyone is out helping to prop it up and there is a lot of noise and debate and gesturing and making of helpful suggestions and general good humour and I think I can see why Hemingway would have preferred the street life of San Francisco de Paula to dinner parties in smart Miramar.

  The house, which his third wife Martha Gellhorn found through the small ads in 1939, was left to the Cuban government by Hemingway when he decided to leave his adopted island following Castro’s revolution twenty years later.

  It is looked after with meticulous care. Every object is noted and catalogued and located, as far as possible, in the same place it had when the Hemingways left. Nine thousand of his books remain on the shelves, each one hand-cleaned by the loyal staff. The public is allowed only as far as the doors and windows, which are thrown open but roped off.

  Hemingway’s ghost is in a mischievous mood today. In order to set up our filming, a small number of us are allowed over the cordon and into the precious interior. We fall silent. So perfect is the feat of preservation that it conveys the eerie impression that the Hemingways might have left the room only five minutes earlier. I stare at the armchair with its most un-macho pattern of leaves and blossoms and try to shift my imagination back forty years and put Hem in there and me opposite watching him pour a huge Gordon’s gin from the tray that is still there with all his bottles on it, when my reverie is abruptly broken by a clatter, followed by a sharp intake of breath. Our thorough, careful, utterly mortified director has dislodged a piece of Venetian pottery from its precarious stand and it now lies in several pieces on the floor. Shock, horror, apology. We expect to be sent home immediately.

  The curator gives a stern lecture, mercifully tempered by his admission that this particular piece has been broken once before. By Raisa Gorbachev. Our director, now a member of one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, feels a little better.

  Hemingway’s love of animals, dead or alive, permeates the house, from the stuffed heads of impala and kudu projecting from the dining room wall to lion skulls from Africa, pickled lizards in the bathroom and books on cats and cat care beside the bed. There were as many as fifty-seven cats living at the Finca, all of them given names with an ‘s’ or a ‘z’ in - Crazy, Christian, Ecstasy, Funhouse, Fats, Friendless. Hemingway had a theory that this enabled them to hear their name called more easily.

  Boise, the most spoiled cat of them all, was, as far as I can tell, the only living creature Hemingway ever allowed in the room when he was writing, apart from his beloved Black Dog.

  My favourite room in the Finca is the bathroom next to his study. It has the best view in the house, a panorama of Havana with the sea in the distance, which can best be enjoyed from the lavatory seat. It also has a bat preserved in a bottle of formalin and a set of manually operated scales, alongside which is a most revealing and intimate glimpse of the man - a chart of his weight, inscribed in pencil on the wall, together with scribbled comments of explanation: ‘17 days off diet, 5 drinking’, 203 lb, ‘after Chinese dinner’ and against one entry ‘with slippers on and pyjamas’.

  By now tour buses are filling the driveway and groups of Dutch, Germans and Italians are circling the house. We slip away through the gardens, to film on Pilar, the forty-foot boat which Hemingway bought in 1934 and gave in his will to his boatman Gregorio Fuentes. Fuentes, still alive at 101, gave the boat to the government who decided it should be preserved up here at the house. It’s set, rather gloomily, in a concrete base with a massive timber cover, surrounded on three sides by swaying bamboo.

  Filming in it isn’t easy. I’m trea
ted rather as we might treat a Cuban who wanted to roller-skate in Westminster Abbey. They are clearly worried about letting me on deck at all, but eventually agree to my climbing aboard, provided I take my shoes off. When I make to sit on the fishing chair, shrieks of horror go up and I have to abort the attempt in mid-squat. It’s a little sad to see this sturdy, practical, unflashy, walnut-hulled working boat ending her days as an untouchable object on a hill nine miles from the sea, but I suppose that’s the price of fame.

  Every night my bed at the hotel has a hand towel sculpture on it and a message from the girls who look after my room. Yesterday the towel had been ingeniously twisted into the shape of a bow tie, with a sheet of loo paper forming the knot in the middle. Tonight it’s a heart, and the message beside it reads:

  ‘Sr Michael, have a nice night. Your maids, Lilian and Isis.’

  Having a nice night in old Havana can be interpreted many different ways. This is not a city for going to bed early with a good book. The streets are alive with all manner of temptations, most of them announced with the Havana hiss. This short sharp sibilance is quite normal amongst the locals but when directed at tourists it can mean an offer of anything from a guide or a Castro coin, to a cigar or a woman. I don’t smoke and I’ve never seen the attractions of numismatics, so I’m left horribly vulnerable.

  One of the odd things about Cuba is that, although only ninety miles away from the US coast, the island exists in a virtual news limbo.

  Some of the hotels have CNN but I could find no foreign language magazines or newspapers on sale. There is one Cuban paper and it is called Granma. This eccentric title refers to the cabin cruiser Granma which brought Castro and Che Guevara back from exile in December 1956 to begin the struggle against the Batista government which led to its overthrow in 1959.