The Old Man Who Loved the Sea, and Papa

THE LIVING ARTS:

THE OLD MAN WHO LOVED THE SEA, AND PAPA

Sharing a friendship with Hemingway and keeping his secrets.

By STEPHEN KINZER

AK PARK, Ill., Jan. 28 — When the leathery backdrop for a great literary career and for the enduring old body of Gregorio Fuentes, Ernest Hemingway legend, a legend that some scholars now O Hemingway's fishing companion and confidant, say is nonsense. finally gave out earlier this month in Cuba, the Fuentes was a born seaman who rode out four sadness spread back here to the Chicago suburb where hurricanes, swam through shark-infested waters to Hemingway was born and raised. rescue a drowning man and could feel in his bones There was the sense of an era ending, a door precisely where the biggest marlin, sailfish and tarpon closing. Hemingway's youngest sister survives, as does would be running, or so Hemingway asserted. In a 1949 one of his sons, but few others now alive can claim to article, Hemingway said that his own role on their boat have known him well. was to hook the prey and then "gradually work him "The necrology is kind of ominous, with two of closer and closer and then in to where Gregorio can gaff his sons passing away in the last year or so and now him, club him and take him onboard." Gregorio," said Scott Donaldson, president of the Fuentes was born in the Canary Islands Hemingway Society. "It reminds you of how far back in sometime between 1897 and 1899. There are different time he was. He's been dead for more than 40 years accounts of how he met Hemingway, one having to do now." with a storm in the Gulf of Mexico from which the two Hemingway always admired and often wrote men found shelter together. In any case they struck up about men like Gregorio Fuentes, whom he found wise, an acquaintance, and around the time Hemingway courageous, close to nature and blessed with innate settled in Cuba in 1939, he hired Fuentes as his nobility. During the years that Hemingway spent in boatman. Cuba, when he evolved from a gifted writer into a myth- "I know that he would rather keep a ship clean shrouded giant who dominated and defined a generation, and paint and varnish than he would fish," Hemingway he spent many afternoons on his boat in the company of once wrote. "But I know too that he would rather fish Fuentes. than eat or sleep." But even in recent years, when he was much The boat on which the two spent countless sought after by tourists, Fuentes kept his employer's hours, the Pilar, was 34 feet long, made of American secrets. black oak and had a cruising range of 500 miles. "He liked to tell stories, but he was also pretty Hemingway paid the Wheeler Shipyard in Brooklyn circumspect," said Scott Schwar, executive director of $7,500 for her in 1934, $3,000 of which was advanced the Hemingway Foundation here, who met Fuentes by Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire, as payment for several times during the last years of his life. "He never future articles. really got into gossiping, although he certainly would The writer and actor George Plimpton had less have been able to." than happy memories of one fishing expedition on the Hemingway and Fuentes were bound together Pilar. "We were out all day and didn't catch anything by a passion for fishing. The open sea formed the except a barracuda," he recalled. "It cut somebody's 1 hand — I forget who — and it was a real mess, blood all Welsh, to an abandoned cay where they could bathe and over the hold." Hemingway could work uninterrupted. Much serious fishing was done aboard the In July 1960 Hemingway left Finca Vigía and, Pilar, and much else as well. Jeffrey Meyers, a after stops in New York and Madrid, landed in Idaho, Hemingway biographer, recently described it as "kind of where he had bought a house on 17 acres of land. The a floating whorehouse and rum factory as well as a following spring, an American-backed force of exiles fishing boat." landed at the Bay of Pigs. It was a shattering event for Fuentes never said anything like that, but he Hemingway writer, because it marked the final break did offer a few glimpses of Hemingway's drinking between the United States and Cuba, and therefore the habits. He had inclusive tastes but favored Gordon's gin impossibility of his return to the home he loved. above all. Whenever possible he drank only from freshly Some scholars say this realization may have opened bottles. helped propel him toward suicide, which he attempted On many of their trips, Fuentes told stories that for the first time on the very day news of the Bay of Pigs he had heard in seaside towns around the Caribbean, and invasion was reported. He took his life on July 2, 1961. some of them may have worked their way into Soon after, fishermen in Cojímar decided to Hemingway's fiction. He claimed to have been a model erect a bust of the American who had lived among them. for the weather-beaten fisherman in "The Old Man and There was no metal available, so they contributed old the Sea," a claim that some biographers say is at least propellers, deck ornaments and whatever else they could partly true. spare. It was melted down, and the resulting monument "The old man was thin and gaunt with deep was unveiled on the first anniversary of his death in wrinkles in the back of his neck," Hemingway wrote of Cojímar's dusty main square, where it still stands. his fisherman, words that could easily have described Finca Vigía, now owned by the Cuban Fuentes. "The blotches ran well down the sides of his government, remains almost exactly as Hemingway left face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from it. Bottles of Cinzano, their wrappers dry and bleached, handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these are still in the wine rack. Books spill from shelves, even scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a in the bathroom. Researchers have discovered that he fishless desert." annotated about one- third of them, and are now During most of the 20 years when Cuba was compiling his notes in search of new insights. Walls and his home — longer than he lived anywhere else — floors are covered with animal head and skins that Hemingway presided over a hilltop estate called Finca Hemingway brought home from safaris in Africa. Vigía, where hummingbirds flitted among the mango The house has a distinctly masculine feel, and trees. He rose early and spent mornings at work, fits the traditional image of Hemingway as a man's man standing at his typewriter wearing a favorite pair of for whom hunting, fishing, boxing and bullfighting were oversized moccasins. For lunch he would sometimes the purest of pursuits. That image is now under visit La Terraza in nearby Cojímar, where his boat was withering attack. moored, or drive to Havana, a few miles away, to visit "There's been a total change in the field, a one of his two favorite bars, the Floridita or the huge reaction against the old conventional wisdom," Bodeguita del Medio. Nights were for reading or said Susan Beegel, editor of The Hemingway Review. entertaining. "It's not a reaction against Hemingway, but against the As often as possible Hemingway broke away male critics and scholars of an earlier era who created from his work to answer the call of the sea, which this one-dimensional macho image of him." meant the call of Fuentes and the Pilar. "These days, people are writing about how real "His life on that boat was certainly one of the and complex his female characters are, how sensitively things he enjoyed most, aside from his work," said his he portrayed romantic relationships, and how son, Patrick Hemingway, who lives in Montana. "I do ambivalent he really was about manhood and gender," think that in Cuba they've made too much about Ms. Beegel said. "Feminist and gay-oriented scholars Gregorio being the one who taught Ernest Hemingway have discovered him with a vengeance. It's really all he knew about fishing. That's not so. But my dad had amazing to see how positively a lot of them view him." a lot of respect for people who find simple but After Hemingway's death Fuentes continued to honorable lives, and he saw that in Gregorio." work when he could, both as a fisherman and charter When Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in captain. Hemingway left the Pilar to him, but soon the 1954, he told Fuentes, "We will have very much money Cuban government placed it on dry-land display at Finca now." That turned out to be true, but there was another Vigía. Whether Fuentes donated the vessel freely or consequence. Visitors began turning up uninvited at under duress remains unclear. Finca Vigía, sometimes by the dozen. Fuentes took on a Like the rest of Cuba, Cojímar drifted into new job, ferrying Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary isolation after Fidel Castro's revolution and the 2 American trade sanctions that followed. More than a few boats have left its harbor under cover of night for desperate runs to Florida. But unlike other local fishermen, Fuentes had something to fall back on: his memories of Hemingway. They gave him celebrity status and allowed him to live differently from his neighbors. "Gregorio is possibly the only fisherman in the world who owns authentic Robert Capa and Karsh photos," the Cuban author Norberto Fuentes (no relation) once observed. "Karsh's famous portrait of Hemingway hangs in his living room." When tourism to Cuba picked up in the 1990's, Finca Vigía became an attraction once more. Visitors could look through open doors and windows but not actually enter the house. Those wishing to take Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway's fishing companion and photographs were sometimes charged $5 a shot. confidant, aboard the Pilar in 1953 off Havana. Tour buses that made the trip to Finca Vigía often stopped at La Terraza, where Hemingway favored the shrimp and crab dishes. There Fuentes was the top attraction. He began charging $50 to spin 15 minutes worth of yarns about his days with Papa, speaking in Spanish with a cigar between his teeth. Sometimes his stories were about fishing trips, like one on which the writer supposedly landed a 1,542- pound marlin. Other times they would have a literary aspect, as when he told a journalist about the night Hemingway was considering titles for his famous novella. "I said to him, `Look, its about an old man. And it's about the sea.' And Papa said, `Yes, that's it!' " Here in Oak Park, where Hemingway did his first writing and where the name E. Hemingway is inscribed among others at the base of a memorial to local men who served in World War I, a museum to his memory draws more than 10,000 visitors each year. Its prize exhibit is the famous breakup letter he received from Agnes von Kurowsky, the 26-year-old American nurse he fell in love with while he was a teenager recovering from his war wound at a Milan hospital. She became the model for Catherine Barkley, the beautiful English nurse in "A Farewell to Arms" who treats and loves an American soldier hospitalized in Hemingway, holding marlin's fin in the 1950s. Gregorio Italy. Fuentes is second from right. "I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart," she wrote. "I can't get away from the fact that you're just a boy — a kid. I somehow feel that some day I'll have reason to be proud of you, but, dear boy, I can't wait for that day."