• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 754 0

babalao invited us to look around her house. She had papered over the living room walls with Life magazine covers dating back as far as the 1930s. In the center of each wall she had plastered three pictures of the Last Supper. Those religious depictions inspired me. With the film crew’s cameras running, I launched into a monologue describing how Christ had not really died on the cross but had instead gone to France, where he worked as a real estate developer and eventually opened an office in Cannes, and how the apostles had fabricated the resurrection as a marketing ploy to win converts, and how Charlemagne and Clovis and members of the Moravian dynasty carried Christ’s bloodlines into the Stuart line in Scotland and how Mary Stuart was my great-great-great-grandmother and how that made me a direct descendant of Jesus Christ.

And so on.

Diana kept trying to attract my attention, but I was on a roll and didn’t notice. We left shortly after I ran out of words. Diana remained silent the entire way back to the hotel. Once we reached our room she could not contain her rage. Diana screamed at me for being so insensitive as to stand in the babalao’s home on a sacred night and mock her religious beliefs while keeping my back turned to our hostess the entire time. If that was any indication of how I treated people, Diana did not want to know me.

She was right. I had behaved thoughtlessly, doing my Bill Lee sidewalk act without giving any regard to how my words might offend the babalao. The next morning I visited the woman’s house to make amends. We had noticed how arthritis had restricted her movements the night before, so I brought a carton of five hundred aspirin, a rare commodity in Cuba. She smiled, clasped my hands in thanks and we said goodbye. After that Diana eventually came to see that my behavior that night was not an irreparable character flaw. My narcissism had just gotten the better of me, and that was something I could work on. Some weeks, it’s a full-time job.

The house where Ernest Hemingway lived from 1940 to 1960 floats on a high promontory, part of a large plantation set above San Francisco de Paulo, a town twenty miles southeast of Havana. The Hemingway hacienda is a one-story Spanish colonial-style building constructed of a ghostly white stucco so porous it seems to absorb the sun’s various colors so that the building shifts its tint depending on the time of day.

A large outdoor pool stretches through the backyard. Back in the fifties, locals would often see Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn drinking cocktails with Hemingway while sitting in lounge chairs at the pool’s edge. One man told me, with undisguised delight, about the night Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth swam naked in its waters. Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner! Just writing their names in the same sentence as the word naked arouses me.

Inside, the house appeared to be waiting for the owner to return. Someone had left a sheet of paper wedged in the Royalton typewriter on the desk where Hemingway once stood to write each morning. The author’s books remain piled high on his desk and library shelves. Stuffed heads of game animals stare down on the living room. Bullfighting posters adorn the walls. Hemingway’s old Victrola rests on a table next to a stack of big-band albums. There is a plate with a drawing of a bull’s head propped up on a mantel. The artist’s signature reads Picasso. On a tray in the center near a plump leather armchair a half-full vintage bottle of Gordon’s gin wants pouring. . . .

We did not come here looking for any of these things.

During the late 1940s Hemingway founded and coached a Cuban Little League team called the Gigi Stars. His son Gregory played on the club with other boys from San Francisco de Paulo. Though baseball unquestionably ranks as the number one sport on this island, the youth leagues have suffered with the declining economy. The national sports committee directs the bulk of its funding toward the adult teams. Most Cuban boys and girls still play the game, but budget cuts have reduced them to using balls made of twine