Travelling with Ernest I - Havana

It is sixty years since Ernest Hemingway published the Old Man and the Sea and just over fifty since he leant on the trigger of his favourite shotgun with the barrel in his mouth. He wrote the novella at his house in the outer hills of Havana and set it in Cojimar, a small town twenty minutes east of Havana’s Prado by the No.58 bus, where he moored his boat after fishing for marlin in the Gulf Stream.

In Cojimar the sun is hot, but the air is clean and cool. The sea is calm. The streets are quiet. There is only one tout who says I am paying too much for my hotel and that I should stay at a bed and breakfast he knows. There is almost a breeze.

It feels far away from the heat and humidity of Havana and its taxi? … taxi? taxi drivers, cigar, sir, cigar cigar sellers, I want to buy your hat hat sellers, Cuban Musicians playing high-school rhythm for tips in public plazas and the prostitutes who sit in pairs along the Malecon.

When I arrive at noon my stomach is empty. It is hours since breakfast and I only eat fruit from the hotel’s buffet: the meat is salt, the scrambled eggs are so dry they leave tongs for you to serve yourself with, and the salads taste like they have been washed in pond water.  But hunger is no limitation with Hemingway, who wrote of being poor and hungry in Paris:

“I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted … Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.”

And if you are tired from hunger rather than eating you feel light-headed but you do not want to sleep. So I walk past the ten-dollar lobster restaurant by the water and sit in a grove of silky oaks and sip water and read the first page aloud …

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

… then the rest in silence.

Hemingway’s writing is often described as declamatory for its simple words and short sentences, but this does not capture its sometimes-tender moments, even though they are like small-fire illuminations in a brutal, oceanic futility. To see them you must breathe well, speak each sentence aloud and try to think what he is aiming for as you exhale what you have left. Most people breathe too shallowly and read too quickly; but then most people do not know how deeply you must breathe, or how slowly you must think, once you have killed an animal worth breathing deeply and thinking slowly about.

In the Old Man and the Sea tenderness amidst brutality is expressed in the Old Man’s thoughts towards the big fish he has hooked:

“I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am … “Fish,” he said softly, aloud, “I’ll stay with you until I am dead.” He’ll stay with me too, I suppose, the old man thought … I wish I could feed the fish, he thought. He is my brother. But I must kill him and keep strong to do it. … Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him.”

Like some of his other stories its main idea – the futility of it all – is revealed only in the final pages. The Old Man, having struggled for three days to catch and bring a big marlin to market, cannot defeat the sharks that come for its flesh when they smell the blood of its perfectly harpooned heart. He arrives in Havana, late at night on the third day with just a skeleton tied to his skiff. Crucified, he takes his mast and stumbles under its weight to his dirt-floor hut, his raw hands and lacerated back bloodied from the fishing line.

Oscar Wilde’s maxim that each man kills the thing he loves is also the maxim of the hunter and Hemingway, like his Old Man, liked to hunt. But the Old Man hunted to alleviate his poverty. Hemingway hunted for pleasure.

I had wondered if the Old Man was Hemingway’s statement of regret about hunting, but my visit to his house, in the outer hills of Havana suggests not.  The house is now a museum and sits on his old estate of abundant royal palms, grass, warm air and cool breezes. It is as it was when he returned to Illinois in 1959.

The thing to notice as you look in from the veranda, through the roped off French doors and closed windows, is that every room has head of an animal that has been hunted to death. Even the toilet has a lizard in formaldehyde that one of his cats killed. The typewriter at which Hemingway wrote the Old Man sits directly below a gazelle’s severed head, but I don’t know if he looked up at it when he wrote, or if he saw a blank wall with room for one more animal he could kill as perfectly as the Old Man harpooned his marlin.

Hemingway went on two safaris, the first in 1934 and the second in 1953, the year after the Old Man was published. Of the first in Tanzania, his grandson Sean wrote that Ernest had ‘excellent hunting’, killing lions, cheetah, zebra, antelope and other species, much of which was used to feed the people in camp who supported the safari. That is, the animals were killed to feed the people who would not have needed feeding there had he or anyone else not gone hunting there.

The grandson writes of the second safari that ‘Hemingway did not shoot well and had few clean kills of big game, although he managed to bag several fine trophies.’ Few clean kills could mean that he missed his target a lot, or that it took several shots to kill each animal he fired at, or that the wounded animals ran off to die elsewhere, out of sight. My guess is that lots of animals died with lots of bullets in them.

Sometimes it can seem like a simple thing to wound an animal when you have gone out to kill it with a gun, as with vermin on a farm. The hit becomes part of the fast closing scene in the animal’s life. You tell yourself ‘It didn’t suffer long.’ Often you can get to an animal in pain and shoot it quick, point blank. Sometimes you need to put a sick animal out of some terrible misery. However and for what reason it is done, it should not be such a simple thing to cause pain to an animal that meant you no harm.

There are two basic types of bullets: solids and hollow points. Their features are as their names suggests – a solid piece of lead, and one with a small hole in its tip. A solid bullet is designed for penetration. It is the bullet of choice to put a sick farm animal out of its misery, because at close range it passes straight through the skull into the brain. At a distance it can pass through an animal’s body and you have to be accurate to kill it instantly.

A hollow point causes the bullet to flatten on impact. It is designed to stay in the body of an animal and shatter its internal organs. From a distance it makes likely a kill with an accurate shot, or great internal damage with a poor shot. A hollow point’s damage is great. If you shoot a small headed animal, like the gazelle above Hemingway’s typewriter, with a hollow point at point blank range, and then turn it over, you will see the other side of its face missing.

Hemingway’s trophies mark his presence everywhere in his house and I imagine him, with his big, satisfied middle-aged gut leaving no room for any other living thing. Somehow the cats and dogs and his wife, family and famous friends all fitted. There are antelope heads on their long necks, proud and sad, a short cut lioness’s head on the desk in the study with its mouth open and with teeth gleaming in fierce symmetry, and the head of a buffalo on one wall of the writing room, its bull neck twisted by its final charge into the dirt.

To make trophies the only place you can shoot an animal dead, instantly, is the heart; but the heart is smaller than the brain and hidden in the body. If you hit the body and not the heart, the animal dies later, sometimes quickly, sometimes not. Hunters like clean kills but a body hit is easy.

The perfect heads of the animals on Hemingway’s walls makes me wonder how many he first shot in the stomach, or the leg, or the shoulder, and watched flinch and run or stagger as the bullet smacked and ripped open inside them.

‘I’m guessing you used a hollow point, Hemingway? How often did you hit the heart? Which bits did the bullets flatten into most and make their hollow mash of blood and flesh and bone?

‘Did you ever see an animal breathing heavily, its wild nostrils full of shock, and vapour condensing and dripping from inside them? And where did you shoot it then when every clean, point blank shot to the head is a hunting trophy lost?

‘Did you ever get close enough to run your fingers through its fur and comfort it, or would that have just frightened it more?

‘Or did you watch and wait for the breathing to become so shallow that all you could hear was the blood flow slowly into the grass tufts, softer than a folding autumn leaf, to make a quiet pool under its body.

‘You did not hunt as the Old Man did. Your sentences are the cracks of a literary gun in whose brutality we find tenderness only by exhaling the last of our breath. What tenderness could you have seen as you let go the last of yours?’