by Norman Lewis
I carried on down to the port, where at this hour the Gallego shark fishermen who came here from Spain were bringing in their blood-lacquered boats, and then went on to the Malecón, the greatest sea promenade in the world. Here nothing had changed in the nineteen years since Ernestina and I had first stepped ashore. Once again I was overwhelmed by these flowering, scented spaces, the great grey, time-scoured walls glistening with their granite facets, the outrageous, thrusting femininity of the women, the playful arrogance of the men, the soft growl of Negro voices through the spray spattering over the sea wall, the rust-choked barrels of cannons that had last fired at English pirates, and the millionaires’ seaside houses like wedding cakes turned to stone, and painted red, blue or yellow according to the political party their owners supported.
At the end of the Malecón I turned back and went to the Parque, and of course this, too, was unchanged, with its broken-nosed statuary, the children scrambling round on hands and knees in search of cigar-ends, the handsome pimps lurking in the bushes, and the imperious Negresses flaunting their beauty before the world.
In those days, Cubans wanted to lend or give me things. I found myself at the wheel of a fish-tail Cadillac pressed on me as a loan by a chance acquaintance who happened to like the English. I was made a member of the Jaimanitas Club, and watched aghast as waiters waded waist-deep into the sea carrying trays of daiquiris for club members who preferred not to leave the water. I wheedled myself into the good books of fishermen who took me out fishing at night with lights. Before they raised anchor they sacrificed a white cockerel to Chango—the Yoruba god of war—in such a way that it fluttered about for a while spilling brilliant gore on its plumage. ‘But you’re Spaniards from Galicia,’ I protested. ‘Yes, dear friend, but this is Cuba’.
Despite outward appearances, profound changes had taken place under the surface. Batista, a sergeant in his twenties in the old days—The Handsome Mulatto, he was called—had taken on and defeated the ferocious colonels of the old regime, but now Batista, too, was old, and had himself been defeated by success and the years; instead of laughing at his opponents he shot them and had filled the city with unmarked graves. One of the old reactionary officers, Enrique Loynaz, had actually survived, and not only that, he had become a general. By the greatest of good luck I had a letter of introduction, and next day was able to call on him, and he took me to see General Garcia Velez, the other surviving hero of Cuba’s War of Independence against Spain. Velez was an outrageous anglophile who had been ambassador to Great Britain for twelve years and had done his best, against considerable odds since his return to Cuba, to create for himself a typical West End of London environment. He was now ninety-four and believed the fairly sedate surroundings in which he lived might help him to last out to a hundred. With this end in view he had filled his flat with heavy Victorian furniture imported from England, and the room in which he received me had a complement of fringed lamp-shades, antimacassars and aspidistras, together with a small part of a unique collection of the Edinburgh Journal. Of these he said that he possessed every issue since the first in 1764, and they were piled round the walls, filling the room with an intense odour of paper under the attack of decay. His prize possession was the biggest pike I had ever seen, displayed in a case among rushes and simulated water. Velez, who admitted to being no fisherman, had bought this at an auction in Notting Hill Gate because it reminded him of one of his aunts. He smiled continually through the grey cobwebbing of his moustache, made a face in mockery of an aunt’s disapproval remembered over most of a century, gesturing in illustration of his thoughts in a wholly un-English fashion with hands patterned with fine, blue veins.
The horrors of war had left Velez a pacifist, whereas Loynaz, despite a variety of wounds, had remained bellicose. The story of his most dramatic escape from death was clearly held ready for such occasions as this, and as soon as a mulatta in lace cape, apron and gloves had brought the Earl Grey tea, he launched into his account.
It was at Babinay in ’98, in the last stages of the war. The Cubans already had the taste of victory in their mouths and the Spanish were preparing to sell their lives dearly behind a seven-foot stockade. Loynaz, who claimed to be a poor horseman at the best of times, was compelled now by iron custom to mount a white horse to lead the final charge. ‘I could never jump,’ he said. ‘I landed on the horse’s neck and one of the Spaniards brought down his machete on the top of my head.’ At this point both Velez and I were ordered to examine the result. The skull had opened up, leaving a trough about six inches in length in the bone, the edges of which could still be felt through the skin. ‘Three American presidents have felt that wound,’ Loynaz said, ‘Harding, Teddy Roosevelt, and I forget the third. I managed to scramble back into the saddle, holding my brains in with my fingers. They got me to the nearest house where a honeymoon couple had installed themselves, and I commandeered their bed. It was a month before I was on my feet again and I noticed a remarkable thing. Up to this time I had suffered from headaches all my life. Now they were gone. My doctor said that opening up the skull had made more space for the brains.’
It was now Garcia Velez’s turn. ‘Do you think he’d like to see the album, Enrique?’ he asked.
‘I’m quite sure he would,’ Loynaz told him.
Velez found a bunch of keys on a shelf and went into the next room. I followed Loynaz to the window, drawing the cool air into my lungs and with it the leafy sharpness that Havana breathed upon us. Space was short in the inner city, and white pigeons coating the window sills of the flat across the way were like packed snow. Far below, what looked like a toy ship flying innumerable pennants was squeezing through that sack of water known as the Bay into the narrow passage to the sea. We turned away and Victorian England took over again with the must of old magazines, and a tinkling musical box Velez had set in action.
The old man returned with his album, and displaced an aspidistra to make room for it on a low table.
‘I inherited it from my ancestor Francisco Miranda,’ Velez said. ‘It’s a piece of history. What’ll become of it when I’m gone, I don’t know. I’ve offered it to the National Museum, but they seem to be toffee-nosed these days.’
He opened the album just as Loynaz released a preliminary cackle. I found myself looking down at a wisp of hair as dry as hay stuck to the centre of a yellowed page over an illegible scrawl of faded ink. ‘What you see there is pubic hair, one of fifty-one examples donated by the great ladies of his acquaintance.’
‘What on earth made them agree?’ I asked.
‘It was a passing craze,’ Velez said. ‘It did a woman’s reputation no harm to have had an association with a man of the standing of Francisco Miranda. All the women were after him when he came to London. He was sixty by then. An old man by those times.’ Velez stroked the filaments of grey hair with a fingertip. ‘This is La Perechola La Segunda,’ he said. ‘She was the greatest actress ever to appear on the American stage. Pay no notice to the message. It’s a fake. She couldn’t write. Nine out of ten of the women couldn’t.’
Velez turned over several pages. ‘Well, there it is. It’s all much of a muchness. I don’t often get the book out these days. It’s showing signs of wear and tear.’
‘May we see the greatest of the conquests?’ Loynaz asked.
‘You may,’ Velez said. He fingered cautiously through the pages, then stopped. ‘At least this one should be in a museum,’ Loynaz said.
‘It should. Where it could be properly looked after, before it’s lost altogether.’
This time the writing was legible under the little ragged tuft a splendid, arrogant K half-smothered in entwining curlicues. ‘Catherine,’ Loynaz murmured reverently.
Velez nodded. ‘The Great Queen.’
‘Apart from the remains in the Kremlin vault this is all that has survived of the body of Catherine the Great of All the Russias,’ said Loynaz.
Velez agreed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You could say that.’
I ex
pressed all the wonder expected of me, yet a lurking doubt remained. Shortly after Loynaz and I left we stopped at the next street corner to enjoy the slight variant in the previous bird’s-eye-view over the city. A blond patch of sea under the walls of the Morro Castle shone as though powerful lamps had been lit in its depths. These days the castle served as a prison for Batista’s many political opponents, and, as was now often the custom, a passing inbound ship sounded a derisive blast of its siren.
‘So what did you think of the famous album?’ Loynaz asked.
‘It gave me a new view of people in the high places of the past. Do you think the Catherine part is true?’
Loynaz patted the cavity in his skull as if to confirm that his brains were still in position. It was a gesture that suggested he might not be sure of the facts. ‘No reason why it shouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘Miranda was forty-odd at the time, an absolute ram of a man. Catherine put up funds for his adventures and invited him to stay in Moscow. She was very lustful. Also, she was fifty-eight.’
A later chat with Velez contained no wounds or pubic hair. People, I said, were talking of the Castro revolt and its chances of success. What was it all about? This gave the General the chance to ride his hobby horse about the scandalous treatment Cuba—and he himself—had received at American hands at the end of the War of Independence, which he believed had sown the seeds of almost all the nation’s subsequent troubles.
‘The war was over before they came in,’ Velez said. ‘They dropped like vultures out of the sky to pick up the spoils. I and my troops were not even allowed into Santiago after the final battle with the Spanish. For six years the Yankees ran the country and snapped up everything worth having. You could buy a caballería of land for the price of two bottles of Coca-Cola. Hence Castro.’
‘Why, hence Castro?’
‘A lot of middle-class boys see Castro as their only chance of getting anywhere. This country is owned by foreigners. Don’t ever believe Karl Marx has anything to do with it.’
‘Isn’t Castro a socialist, then?’
‘We’re talking of high school boys who can’t be found nice white-collar jobs. Fidel started as a lawyer. He went in for revolutions because he only had ten clients and they were too poor to pay. Did anyone ever tell you how the present bother started? It was over an increase in bus fares. They put up the bus fares and this was the last straw. University drop-outs who refused to walk.’
This interview took place days after Herbert Matthews of the New York Times had been the first visitor to the Sierra Maestra and Castro’s handful of revolutionaries. Matthews could count only twenty of them, but he took Castro’s word for it that there were ‘plenty more lurking somewhere in the background’ and was much impressed. Fidel, possibly the greatest talker in history, talked him into the ground. ‘Thousands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel Castro, and the new deal for which he stands,’ Matthews wrote in his paper.
I phoned Ian, mentioning in a roundabout way the possibility of a trip to the Sierra, which I described as a mountaineering holiday. By this time I had learned that Ruby Hart Phillips, the New York Times correspondent on the island, had had a hand in the Matthews interview, and I hoped that she might do something of the kind for me. It turned out that she shared Scott’s office, but was also away. There was no shortage of undercover operators in this city, for another organiser of Matthews’ trip happened to be in town at this moment, and an evening meeting with this man took place in the intensely informal surroundings of the coffee shop of the Sevilla Hotel. No-one would have dreamed that Havana was in a state of revolutionary ferment. The Castro agent, straight from the Sierra, made no attempt to check on my bona fides, or even my identity. While in the middle of what was supposed to be a highly confidential discussion, a shoe-shine boy grabbed my foot, put it on his box, started to rub polish into the shoe, and was completely ignored. The headquarters of the SIM special police was only 150 yards away, and possibly for this reason we were interrupted by a burst of sub-machine gun fire. We sauntered to the door, but saw nothing but running men in the distance. A stylish prostitute approached, bowed slightly and presented each of us with a nicely engraved card and withdrew. Years back, to commemorate a birthday, Batista had released five thousand canaries in the streets of the city, and now one of their descendants, disturbed by the gunfire, woke up in a nearby shade-tree and began to sing. Next to the coffee shop the hotel ran a bingo game. All the players were men, some of them with pistols outlined in their hip pockets, and none had bothered to move. A little team of boys who patrolled such hotels were picking up half-smoked cigars for exceedingly skilful reconstitution. The agent and I finished our business and he had a request to make. He was slightly bored with life in the Sierra, he said, and also a little lonely in Havana, which was not his home town. However, he knew of a good American gangster film showing at that moment, and wondered whether, if I had nothing better to do, I would consider accompanying him to see it. To this I readily agreed.
Next morning Scott was back, and we met in the coffee shop. His appearance came as such a surprise that for a moment I thought that I had picked out the wrong man He was short and somewhat plump, with rosy cheeks, small blue eyes and the expression of a confiding child. He had been a champion boxer, but had put on weight. All Ian’s friends asked sooner or later if James Bond was based on a character from real life, and the standard replay was that he was an amalgam of four actual persons, one being a ‘toughie’, who lived in Cuba.
So this was one quarter of James Bond. He read the letter of introduction very slowly, then folded it with great care and put it into the breast pocket of his shirt. In this brief delay I took in his small feet encased in brilliantly polished shoes, the gold fountain pen and the small, dimpled hands. Most importantly I noticed that in moments of concentration, as while reading the letter, his expression became wary and stern.
‘Let’s go and talk things over,’ he suggested. He guided me to the lift and we went up to his flat, at the end of a long passage scented with wax polish and fine cigars. The door was closed to, but not on the lock. He pushed it wide and waved me through, and we passed into a kind of small anteroom, in which stood a quite naked Negress, who at first glance I took to be a statue in an elegant but lifeless pose. She presented a side view, and in passing I could not help noticing the goose-pimples produced by the chill of the air-conditioning which growled softly like the warning of a tiger from a thicket. Scott glanced at her in passing and then after a moment of hesitation we passed on into his office.
Of this incident I was later to wonder if he had simply forgotten the girl was there. It transpired that, like the Belgian writer Simenon, Scott believed frequent intercourse increased mental creativity and, again like Simenon, he kept a register with entries of several thousand such encounters over the years, accomplished wherever and however the opportunity arose. Occasionally there were embarrassments. ‘No, Mr Scott, I didn’t stop by last week to get your OK for the war-risk surcharge for your building. Surely you remember screwing me on Friday?’ It was a compulsion he shared with J. F. Kennedy, who occasionally popped over to Havana for random excitements of the kind, and Scott had had the pleasure, as he claimed, of showing him round.
Scott ran over the contacts list again. ‘Who have you seen?’
‘The lot,’ I said. ‘All but Ruby Hart Phillips and Hemingway.’
‘Hemingway?’ he said. ‘But why Hemingway?’
‘Because Ian thinks that he and Castro may be working together.’
Scott omitted a low-pitched, bellowing laugh. ‘Hemingway of all people,’ he said.
‘There’s some story that he met Castro when he was hunting in the mountains.’
‘The only mountain Hemingway hunts in is the Montana Bar. Hemingway is a burnt-out case. Any time you want you can see him in Sloppy Joe’s. His friends bring him king-sized prawns. He chews them up and swallows the lot, shells and all.’
I was already beginning to suspect that Ernest
Hemingway was a waning star. Jonathan Cape’s new American partner, Robert Knittel, was married to the film star Luise Rainer who did not conceal her dislike of him. The American humourist S. J. Perelman had published a piece in the New Yorker describing the two men’s encounter in Africa, where Hemingway had made it clear that the only thing that interested him about Africa was the availability of the local girls. Scott’s intense dislike of the great man stemmed from an incident that had recently taken place at a party given by the British Ambassador in celebration of the Queen’s birthday, at which Ava Gardner had appeared on Hemingway’s arm. In a moment of high spirits the actress had taken off her pants and waved them at the crowd. Scott, who saw himself as a confirmed patriot, objected to this insult to the crown. In the wrangle that followed Hemingway, known for his bellicosity, threatened to thrash Scott ‘within an inch of his life’.
‘Next day,’ Scott said,’ I sent him a formal challenge to a duel.’
My feelings showed in my expression. ‘Don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘This is a serious matter.’
‘Do people still fight duels in Cuba?’ I asked.
‘They do. Frequently. Right now they have a couple of victims mixed up with the student revolutionaries in the city morgue. Now that’s a place you should take a look at some time.’
‘Do you think Hemingway will accept?’
‘No, I think he’ll back down. Anyway, in case he doesn’t, how about being my second?’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It would make a good story, but nobody would ever believe it, so what’s the point?’
