Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

by Brad Listi

  They were wrong.

  Back at home in Ketchum, Hemingway’s condition deteriorated quickly. In April of 1961, he tried to take his own life no fewer than three times. Once, he even went so far as to try to walk into the whirring propellers of a stationary airplane.

  In the wake of these attempts, Hemingway was taken back to the Mayo Clinic, where, over the course of the next two months, he was subjected to further electric shock treatments.

  In late June, Hemingway’s doctors deemed him fit to be freed once again. Mary came and picked him up, and together the two of them went back to Idaho.

  Two days later, in the early-morning hours of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway killed himself successfully.

  Mary was in bed at the time. She heard the shot, raced downstairs, and found her husband dead in the front entryway. He was wearing a red robe, his head was blown apart, and his brains were on the ceiling. There was a high-powered rifle between his legs. He was sixty-one years old.

  Ernest Hemingway’s father, Clarence, offed himself too. So did his sister, Ursula, and his brother, Leicester.

  In 1996, Ernest Hemingway’s eldest granddaughter, Margaux, committed suicide in her apartment in Santa Monica, California. She took an overdose of the barbiturate Klonopin, becoming the fifth family member in four generations to kill herself successfully.

  11.

  The morning after we met, Pamela and I ate breakfast in the café on the rooftop of the Ambos Mundos. The skies were gray, and the air was stifling. The food was terrible—soggy and stale. I had lukewarm coffee and a piece of dry toast. It was the only thing I felt I could hold down. Pamela had a banana. Laughing, she pretended to perform fellatio on it. Yawning, I pretended not to notice.

  There were two guys in Hawaiian shirts eating at a nearby table, talking American English. They were wearing shades, and they had briefcases. I was pretty sure they were CIA.

  From there, Pamela and I set out into town. We walked along the Plaza de Armas, browsing at books and staring at people. I suggested we take a cab to San Francisco de Paula to check out the Finca Vigía. My hangover was vicious, and I felt like getting out of the city. Pamela told me she’d never been to the Finca before. That settled it. An enriching experience for everyone involved. We walked over to the Canal de Entrada and hailed a cab. Our driver was the nervous sort, a spindly little hombre in a black clip-on necktie. He swung us by Pamela’s apartment in the Vedado district on our way out of town. She ran inside, changed clothes, packed a suitcase, and off we went.

  La Finca Vigía wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. It was a run-down, whitewashed Spanish affair with tall windows and high ceilings. The front steps were crumbling, the paint was peeling, and the foliage was overgrown. The windows were wide-open, and the place was crawling with employees and guards. Every time you took a photograph, they charged you five bucks. It was a tremendous crock of shit.

  Pamela seemed to be enjoying herself, for the most part. Her confusion over the fact that we weren’t having sex had subsided a bit. I had made zero mention of my psychosexual neuroses, particularly as they pertained to my recent entanglements with abortion, heartbreak, suicide, compound interest, and The Afterlife. And Pamela, to her credit, didn’t press for any answers. For one hundred dollars a day, she was willing to live with mystery.

  All things considered, I found her to be pretty good company. She had a sweet disposition and seemed to have a good sense of humor. All day long, I watched her interact with others, and she almost always got them laughing. She had a funny, squeaky voice and great facial expressions. And she looked good smoking a cigarette.

  In addition to being my travel companion, Pamela was also my translator. Generally speaking, Cubans talked too fast for me to understand anything of substance. My ears picked up bits and pieces, but mostly their rapid-fire delivery left me in the dark. Furthermore, my conversational abilities were severely limited. Even when I did understand what people were saying, the best I was able to come up with in response were simple phrases and platitudes, most of which were useful only in restaurants, airports, and train stations. In normal exchanges, nine times out of ten, I wound up feeling two-dimensional and utterly brainless. With Pamela around, I was able to express myself with some degree of depth and effectiveness. She was, in other words, the conduit through which I demonstrated my personality.

  Though aged forty years, the Finca had gone untouched since Hemingway hightailed it to Idaho to begin his hellish descent into the abyss. The place looked lived-in. Eyeglasses resting atop a stack of books on a side table. Half-empty bottles of booze. Cocktail glasses. Magazines. It was as if the man himself might show up back at home any minute now.

  Large busts of wild game were hanging everywhere, monuments to Hemingway’s formidable skill at killing animals with rifles. The vacant eyes and the vacant expressions made me uneasy. Until recently, dead animals had never really affected me like this. Now, for some reason, I couldn’t stand the sight of them.

  And I couldn’t really eat them, either. This was a new development too. It had started shortly after Amanda’s funeral. I was down in Louisiana, standing in my grandmother’s kitchen watching my aunt Lucy disembowel the Christmas turkey. I looked at that turkey and its innards, and suddenly, out of nowhere, something inside of me snapped. I walked out of the house in a light sweat, hunched over in the backyard, and nearly vomited. From that moment forward, I stopped eating meat.

  carnophobia n.

  Fear of meat.

  12.

  Hemingway’s closet was the strangest part of the tour. The hanging coats, the hanging pants, and the big, empty shoes. The empty shoes did something to me. I stared at them awhile. They solidified the fact that he had actually existed. The rest of the place just looked like some maniac hunter’s secluded island getaway. Then you got a load of the empty shoes, and it hit you.

  A long path led from the main house down to the swimming pool. The swimming pool was drained dry and huge, twelve feet deep at the deep end, maybe deeper. To the right of it were four wooden headstones, each one inscribed with a name: Black, Negrita, Linda, and Neron. The burial site of Hemingway’s favorite dogs.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t have their heads stuffed and mounted,” I said to Pamela.

  “¿Cómo?” she said.

  taxidermy n.

  The art or operation of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of dead animals for exhibition in a lifelike state.

  Not too far from the pool stood Hemingway’s old fishing boat, Pilar. The woman on guard knew all about the boat. She even let me take a picture of it, free of charge. I liked this woman. She had a nice smile. She gave us a bit of background on the boat, all of which Pamela relayed to me in broken English.

  The woman finished by telling us that we should check out Cojímar, a nearby seaside village where Hemingway used to dock the boat. Apparently, his old ship captain, Gregorio Fuentes, still lived there. Fuentes, she told us, was the man upon whom Santiago, the lead character in The Old Man and the Sea, had been modeled.

  According to the woman, he was now over one hundred years old. And he accepted visitors.

  On hearing this, my interest was piqued.

  “We can go visit him?” I said to her.

  Pamela translated.

  “Sí, sí,” said the woman. “Visit.”

  The gears in my mind started turning immediately. I started daydreaming. I imagined the Old Man and me sitting by the seashore, smoking cigars and drinking rum from goblets made of whalebone. I imagined the Old Man, seated in a rocking chair, looking out wistfully upon the rippling sea. I would be seated at his feet. The golden light of the setting sun would be shining upon our faces.

  Old Man, I would say to him. Tell me the wisdom of the ages.

  All right, the Old Man would kindly reply.

  13.

  Our cabdriver knew the way. It took us about thirty minutes to get there. We drove through the countryside to the coast. I chain-smoked the entire
way, as did Pamela. Our cabdriver smoked too.

  Cojímar looked like a ghost town. Hardly anyone in the streets. No cars. One cyclist, blond, wearing obnoxious neon spandex. A German tourist, perhaps. There was a large, decrepit governmental-type building to our left. It looked like an old courthouse, crumbling and abandoned. The lawn out front was littered with trash. The rest of town seemed to consist of small shacks lined up side by side in a vaguely suburban and symmetrical manner.

  Our cabdriver got Fuentes’s exact address from a bartender at La Terraza, a tavern in town. The house was up a hill, not too far away. It was a one-story affair, just like all the others. For some reason, I found this surprising. I expected the Old Man to be venerated. I expected him to be living like royalty. Anybody who made it to one hundred deserved to be living like royalty, in my opinion.

  I knocked on the door, and a man answered. He looked about forty. In perfect English, he introduced himself as Rafael, Don Gregorio’s great-grandson. He smiled and invited us inside. We stepped into a small, quiet sitting room. Rafael excused himself and walked toward the back of the house and returned pushing a wheelchair containing the Old Man. On seeing him, my heart jumped and my breath went shallow. The Old Man was ancient, speechless, and small. His skin was utterly ravaged from age and sun. His nose was bulbous and covered in gin blossoms. He had no teeth. He probably weighed 120 pounds. Everything was shriveled, dying, deteriorated—except for the eyes. The eyes remained lucid and blue.

  Pamela said hello, introduced both of us. The Old Man just sat there in his wheelchair, staring blankly in our direction. He said nothing at all and made very little acknowledgment of our presence. I felt completely idiotic.

  Rafael, sensing my discomfort, stepped in and did all of the talking. His delivery was fluid. He seemed to have a routine.

  After a brief introductory speech, he walked out of the room and returned with some artifacts. One of Hemingway’s old deep-sea fishing rods. Gregorio’s old fishing knife. A photo album. He regaled us with stories of Herculean drinking binges and implored his great-grandfather to show us the multiple scars on the palms of his hands, accrued over the decades from a multitude of hooks, knives, and fishing lines.

  The Old Man turned his hands upside down, and we examined his scars.

  Part of the tour.

  We didn’t stay long. It didn’t seem appropriate. The Old Man was old and tired and didn’t need to be bothered like this. After about ten minutes of small talk, I made motions to leave, asking Rafael to snap a photograph of Pamela and me with Gregorio before we hit the road. He snapped three shots.

  Before we left, he hit us up for cash, explaining that he and his great-grandfather accepted whatever donations visitors might be able to offer as a token of appreciation for the Old Man’s time. I gave him fifty bucks.

  Rafael then asked Pamela to give his great-grandfather a kiss on the cheek.

  “My great-grandfather loves three things,” he said to me. “Rum, cigars, and beautiful women.”

  I tried to laugh. Rafael made his request to Pamela in Spanish. It was so base, even I could understand it. Pamela complied without a second thought, kissing the Old Man on his sun-beaten cheek.

  No mention was made of the fact that, for a fee, she would have gladly screwed his brains out.

  14.

  The following day, we rented a car and drove out to Viñales, a picturesque village a half day’s drive from Havana. We stayed for two nights at a big pink hotel called the Hotel Los Jazmines. It overlooked the Viñales Valley and had a big blue swimming pool. Pamela loved it. She loved swimming pools. We swam in the pool for hours on end and drank fruity drinks in the sun. On the morning of the second day, we went horseback riding through Viñales National Park. It was beautiful. The red earth valley floor, the mogotes, the lush greenery. Pamela loved that, too. She loved horses.

  From there, we drove back to Havana and checked back into the Hotel Ambos Mundos. It was a nice hotel, a good place to stay. Hemingway had written a lot of For Whom the Bell Tolls there, in a sea-facing room on the fifth floor. The facade and the interior had been restored with historical accuracy. You walked in the door, and you felt like it was 1934. I liked that.

  On my last night in Cuba, we went up to the rooftop bar for dinner and some Cuba libres. It was nearing dusk. Our waiter brought us a round of drinks, and the house band started playing. Havana lay below. The Caribbean in the distance. With the sun going down, it was pretty romantic. And Pamela looked beautiful. She was wearing a red dress I’d bought for her in town that day for ten bucks, with red lipstick and red shoes to match. She looked like something straight out of the 1950s.

  Pamela’s eyes, I noticed, were a little glazed over. She was on her third Cuba libre of the evening and her fifth drink of the day. Everywhere we went, she wanted another cocktail. And she rarely ate. Every time we sat down to a meal, she hardly touched her food. I’d ask her why, and she’d say she was full. She said she didn’t want to be gordo and filled her cheeks up with air and made a face. Her body was her livelihood. She smoked a pack a day.

  She should’ve been in high school.

  A breeze blew over the rooftop. It smelled like the ocean. I lit another cigarette and looked at Pamela.

  I told her that she looked like a Cuban Betty Boop, but she didn’t understand me.

  Two drinks later, Pamela asked me about my life in the States. She wanted to know what it was like, what the people were like. She was convinced it was a wonderland. It seemed as though she wanted me to tell her that the whole country was like one big episode of Baywatch, that everyone was beautiful and tan, running around in bathing suits, driving around in SUVs and sports cars, rich beyond imagination.

  I tried to explain to her the fallacy of movies and television, but her understanding of English and my understanding of Spanish didn’t allow for much more than a basic exchange of ideas. Language barriers are hell on theoretical discussions.

  “America has problems, too,” I said.

  Pamela frowned.

  I thought of this thing Mother Teresa once said: “Loneliness is the poverty of the West.” I repeated it to Pamela. She nodded. She knew who Mother Teresa was. She said she understood. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t.

  Loneliness is the poverty of the West.

  It was a heavy thing to say, but it made sense to me at the time. I was a little bit drunk at the moment. I was feeling kind of sad.

  Pamela asked me once again about my family. She wanted to know if my parents were living. I told her yes. I told her all about my parents, where they lived, what they looked like, what they did.

  “I miss my parents,” I said. “Me gusta mis padres.” I was getting sentimental.

  Pamela nodded.

  “My mother is worried sick right now,” I said. “She didn’t want me to come to Cuba.”

  Pamela told me she didn’t have a mother. Her mother had died many years ago. Brain cancer got her when she was twenty-eight.

  “Mi mamá es mi estrella,” Pamela said, looking at the sky.

  Here’s how you make a Cuba libre:

  Ingredients:

  2 oz. white rum

  1 oz. lime juice

  Coca-Cola

  Mixing Instructions:

  Pour lime juice over ice cubes in a tall glass. Add rum.

  Top with cola. Stir and serve.

  It wasn’t long before my tongue slipped. The rum took over, and I started giving Pamela unsolicited advice about her future—something I’d been itching to do ever since the moment we met.

  “This is dangerous, what you do,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Yes, she told me.

  “You’re young,” I said. “You’ve got a whole lifetime ahead of you.”

  I won’t have much of a life if I’m starving, she replied.

  “What does your father think of this? He can’t be happy about it.”

  Let’s not talk about my father, she said.

  She mentione
d that he lived in Pinar del Río, that they saw each other now and again. But not too often.

  Then the band kicked in with a slow number. Pamela rose, asked me to dance, snapped her fingers, and told me she was tired of talking. There was hardly anyone else up there on the rooftop, just one other table full of fifty-something European tourists. It sounded like they were speaking Italian. Nobody was dancing.

  I tried to beg off, but Pamela insisted. She took me by the hand and led me out onto the tile floor. The band members smiled, happy to be playing for someone.

  “Yo no comprendo bailar,” I said. “It isn’t my thing. I’m no good.”

  “Is okay,” she said. “Es bueno.”

  We slow-danced. Left-foot, right-foot circles, nice and easy, nothing complicated, just like junior high. I was holding Pamela’s right hand with my left hand. My other hand was around her waist. Her other hand was up behind my neck.

  “See?” she said. “Is good.”

  And it was good. Dancing was a good idea. Our conversations were going nowhere. Talk was cheap. I was leaving Cuba the next day. She was stuck there. I had no business lecturing her. The best I could do was wish her luck and give her the rest of the cash in my waist belt. That right there was the cold, sad truth.

  “You take care of yourself,” I said to her.

  Pamela looked up at me and told me that maybe one day, if things changed, she would come and visit me in the United States. Yes, I told her, please come visit me. She asked me if I would take her to New York City and California. Yes, I told her, of course I would. Anywhere she wanted to go. New York. California. The desert. The West.