Hemingway's Boat (55 page)

What he didn't tell was how, before it had come lashing, Adriana had cut her finger on a fin of a fish, and of how he'd bent over her to suck out the blood, and of how Mary, sickened at the sight, had turned her face and gone to another part of the boat. All of them arrived back at the
finca
for a belated and relatively quiet Thanksgiving dinner. Not quite three weeks later, into the lee of these becalmed gales, knowing next to nothing of them, not then, came an alert and highly educated young Foreign Service officer with important duties at his nation's embassy. His girlfriend, whom he'd been dating since October, brought him out about an hour before dark on that Thursday afternoon.

“I know what I know. I don't think I had blinders on. I would have been reacting closely to everything. I know how warm he was. I know how we just seemed to hit it off from the first—what's wrong with that? I never really saw the kind of behavior all these books love to describe, and if I had witnessed some of it for myself, then I might have carried across the years a wholly different feeling,” I've heard an old man in California say. Sometimes, though, and more often lately than formerly, I've heard sentiments like those being expressed less with a conviction and defiance than with a small, weary note of apology seeming to be tucked inside them—which has made me feel almost dirty, as if I've flown across the country once more to goad Walter Houk into saying things he not only doesn't wish to say but is incapable of saying.

Walter Houk's gray-painted wood and stucco house in the foothills of the inland slope of the Santa Monica Mountains is shaded by eucalyptus trees and river birches and seventy-foot-high coast redwoods and, most immensely, a two-hundred-year-old live oak that comes right up through the deck. That California live oak in the back of Walter's home always puts me in mind of the immense ceiba that used to shade the front of Ernest Hemingway's home and which came right up through the front steps and part of the Finca's foundation. A ceiba is a silk-floss tree, native of Brazil and Argentina, with greenish bark and with spring and summer blossoms that range in color from white to pale pink to deep pink. (Hemingway's used to swoon into pink in mid-February.)

In 1985
,
Martha Gellhorn traveled back to Cuba for the first time in four decades. Afterward she wrote a lyric piece, laced with bitterness and regret. The story was published in
Granta
magazine in January 1987 and was titled “Cuba Revisited.” The opening: “The first morning in Havana, I stood by the sea-wall on the Malecon, feeling weepy with homesickness for this city. Like the exile returned; and ridiculous. I left Cuba forty-one years ago, never missed it and barely remembered it. A long amnesia, forgetting the light, the color of the sea and sky, the people, the charm of the place.”

She wrote of the village that was right below her old home, and of how she really had known nothing of it in the years she lived there, except that San Francisco de Paula had a post office and many ragged children, at whom she would wave when she rode into town in the car. “I did not say to myself: it isn't my country, what can I do? I didn't think about Cuba at all. Everything I cared about with passion was happening in Europe. I listened to the radio, bought American newspapers in Havana, waited anxiously for letters from abroad. I wrote books, and the minute I could break free, I went back to the real world, the world at war.”

She wrote about how she used to swim in the sea, wearing motorcycle goggles—“masks and snorkels had not been invented.” She must have been so fetching
.

She managed in the piece to pull off the feat of not uttering the despised Ernest Hemingway's name until the last pages. She collected Gregorio
Fuentes from his little house in Cojimar and went out with him to the
finca,
which was now the Museo Hemingway, property of the state. Gregorio was almost eighty-eight. They rode up the long driveway flanked by its huge royal palms and hibiscus and jacaranda trees—she remembered nothing so grand when she'd lived there. They came around the curve. There was the “pleasant old one-story affair,” a limestone villa with its six airy rooms, only now the house was standing “glaring white and naked.” When she lived at the
finca,
she had it painted a dusty and pale pink, to pick up the colors of the ceiba's blossoms. “It looks like a sanatorium,” she said to Gregorio. And then, her shock. Why, yes, no wonder it's so naked-looking. “What did they do to the ceiba?” she asked. Gregorio told her the roots were pushing up the floor; the tree had to go. “They should have pulled down the house instead,” she replied, which must have meant more than it literally said
.

From the piece:

I once asked Walter when we were standing beneath his live oak how far away the ocean was. “Oh, I suppose about ten miles, as the crow would fly, if you got up high and rode the ridges, and then came swooping down the other side,” he said
.

For many years now, this old eagled widower has been walking the slopes and ridges of his side of the Santa Monica range. He can begin literally at his front door. Usually he does his workout in the 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. hour. He's almost always awake by 4:00
.
Old men wake up early. He'll lie there for a while in the darkness. Possibly some memory of Nita or something about one of his children will float into his mind. He'll listen for the soft thump of the newspaper hitting the front step. He'll get out of bed, put on the coffee, come back, make the bed, get dressed, do his exercises, retrieve the paper, go out the front door. He loves taking his walks in the early winter, when the hills are turning green with the oats the Spanish planted two centuries ago. He's got about half a dozen routes, and he likes to vary them so that he won't get bored. Few people
will be out at this hour—the dog walkers, some joggers padding by. Two or three of his routes take him up pretty high, nearly to the top of the ridges, just as a bird would go, to crooked little streets named San Blas and Iglesia. On the inland slope of the Santa Monica range, the ascent is much steeper than on the seaward side. On the seaward slope, long, gentle canyons support clear-running streams, at least one of which, Malibu Creek, is still alive with steelhead and rainbows. The predawn fragrance of so many California blossoms, summer and winter, cannot help but remind Walter of predawn fragrances on an island he said good-bye to in the early fall of 1952
,
bound for new adventures and a new diplomatic assignment in Tokyo
.

“I just don't wish to go back,” he has said often. “I'm too old to go back now, but even if I weren't, I wouldn't go.”

“You kind of prefer to hold it all inside you?”

“I guess.”

“It's a philosophical notion?”

“I don't know if it's that lofty.”

When his workout is through (the distance is closer to a mile and a half, but he permits himself to round it off at an even two miles, because of the inclines he's negotiated, and, by the way, one of his curvier routes takes him right past a young and still green ceiba), he comes back to the house for his mug of black coffee and a page-by-page read of the
Los Angeles Times.
He takes his meds. He checks his e-mail. He eats his breakfast. “This gets me to about eight o'clock,” Walter told me once. “The rest of the day is pretty flat.” There was quiet resignation in it. I tried to shift the subject. He shook his head. “What you're not quite seeing is the memory failure. My ancient memory is still there. Thank God. It's the recent things. What can be done? Nothing. You outlive it. Except you don't. You just go on.”

Years ago, starting out on this book, I used to go into a small soundproof booth at the Library of Congress and listen to Ernest Hemingway's voice on old wire recordings. The material on the preserved spools had long been transferred to audiotape, but the voice I heard was the one that had been captured magnetically by lengths of wire in a house in Cuba in the late forties and into the early fifties. In August 1949
,
as a way of trying to help him beat back his mountain of mail, Hemingway's publisher had presented him with a new wire recorder. He was said to be very tentative
with it at first, and I can picture him holding the mic like a man holding something that's about to bite. Six decades later, I could go into a room and hear the disembodied self of Ernest Hemingway spookily speaking in my ear in a thin, precise, high-timbered pitch. Actually, according to Walter and others, his voice wasn't thin or high-timbered at all—it was just the primitive technology of the day
.

On October 20, 1949
,
deep inside the writing of
Across the River,
about to go out for a long weekend on
Pilar
with his wife, Hemingway was using his new talk machine to write to his youngest son. Gigi, whose troubles were hardly unknown in the family, was then almost eighteen and in his freshman year at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, but soon to drop out, much against his parents' wishes, and head for an abortive stay on the West Coast and a half-century spiral of psychic pain. In a month, Hemingway and his wife would sail for Europe on the
Île de France,
stopping over in New York, where among other things he would permit comely and ambitious young Lillian Ross to follow him around with her notebook. As for the new book, whose title hadn't really come to him yet, he told his son that he was at fifty-four thousand words and coming like a racehorse down the stretch. “We are ahead by about eleven lengths as of this morning,” he told his boy. He'd been “averaging close to 1,000 a day keeping the quality as it should be.” Damn, he wished Mr. Gig could read it right then. Next paragraph: “Please don't ever let them sell you on that powerful personality line which is evidently the thing on which my sons are sold now. I would not believe it myself because do not run as a powerful personality but rather as an instructor, never a professor, and am only fond of my children and try to tell them the truth. If there is any such thing.” Next came a revealing sentence: “Understand all your problems within the limits of my intelligence and back your plea all the way.” Further down: “[I]f you want to come up to New York to talk anything over …” Toward the close: “It's a beautiful morning, Schatz, with the mist laying in the hollows and over the hills as gray as Monet ever painted it.” Signing off: “So long, Mr. Gig, and try not to worry. It never got anybody anywhere. Much love from all your friends here, And from Papa.”

Four nights later, Sunday, late at night, Gigi's papa was back from the sea and dictating on the machine to Charlie Scribner. He said it had been a wonderful trip, and not least because of how rough the weather had been. They'd all taken it fine, including
Pilar.
They'd caught enough fish to fill up the deep freeze for weeks. He felt ready to go back at it hard again. “Want to clear everything up so as to sleep good and pitch
good tomorrow.” A few sentences down: “Mary is fine and says she had the finest trip on the ocean that she ever made. For once it was almost rough enough for her.… At one time we had to have five anchors out and heard the surf cannonading on the reef all night. I like it very much but very few women do and I have been extremely lucky to find one who does.” The way “cannonading” came off his tongue and rolled through the mesh speaker in the darkened booth at the LOC was its own sweet onomatopoeia. It would be another four years before I discovered that the woman who took that letter off the magnetic spool and put it down in shorthand with a fountain pen in a tan marbleized stenographer's notebook and then transferred it by typewriter to a piece of onionskin airmail letterhead that was surely limp with Havana humidity was Walter Houk's wife—who wasn't his wife at that point, who, in fact, hadn't even met Walt yet. But Nita Jensen would, and eventually they'd get to California, beneath a gallant old live oak
.