“I was the funeral,” Hemingway said.
“An old dog?”
“Not so old, still full of hell. Black Dog. One of Batista’s goons bashed in his head with a rifle butt. They were chasing a rebel they thought had guns hidden near my pool. Black Dog didn’t like the soldiers and bit one on the thigh, going for the money. Smartest damn dog in the western hemisphere and he’s dead, a casualty of the revolution. Let’s go inside.”
He led them to the living room and gestured them to the sofa, then sat in an overstuffed armchair. The room had full bookcases on every wall and two hunting trophies, the mounted heads of a black-horned gazelle and a seven-point red deer. Rum, gin, bourbon and scotch bottles clustered on a table by his chair. “Too early to drink,” he said, “and my doctor won’t let me have a goddamn thing.”
“I thought I detected you drinking daiquiris the other night.”
“I was on shore leave.”
“Did the soldiers find those guns by your pool?” Renata asked.
“I hope not.”
“Do you know the rebels?”
“I fish with them.”
“Are they with the Twenty-sixth?”
“I wouldn’t ask them that question.”
“I ask because I had friends killed in the Palace attack,” Renata said.
“So did I,” said Hemingway.
“We were at the Montmartre last night,” Quinn said. “Ten minutes after we left they killed an army colonel at the casino, Fermín Quesada.”
“You people know where the action is.”
“We’re heading for Oriente,” Quinn said. “Climb the hills and see Fidel. I know your friend Matthews just did that, but Fidel is worth another interview, don’t you think? Batista’s people kill him every day in the papers.”
“Batista’s finished. Those Directorio kids at the Palace proved that. When fifty or sixty of the best young people in the country give up their lives to kill you, you’re all done. Can you get to Fidel?”
“I’m working on it.”
“You have to get past the army and their barricades. They’re mean sonsabitches.”
“There’s an army press conference tomorrow in La Plata. I’m going.”
“You ever cover a war?”
“The cold war in Germany, Fourth Division, your old outfit.”
“Did they teach you how to climb mountains in a tropical rain forest when you’re dodging hostile fire?”
“I missed that lecture. I’ll have to wing it. I was writing sports for the Division weekly. But my grandfather came down here to find Céspedes during the Mambí war and wrote a book about it. He called it Going to Meet the Hero. Ever hear of it?”
“I read hundreds of books for a war anthology I edited, and I remember some Americans wrote well about Cuba back then. What was his name?”
“Daniel Quinn.”
“Ah. Recycling family history.”
“Why not? He covered the Civil War for the Herald, and rode with the Fenians when they invaded Canada. He got around. But his book on going to see Céspedes got to me. He walked the swamps, the jungle, and the mountains in Oriente, and he got to his man. The Spaniards starved him in jail and he damn near died, but he got out and wrote the story and then wrote the book.”
“Now you’re looking for jail time.”
“I was in a saloon in Greenwich Village with a friend of mine who thinks his fame is just around the corner, either as a writer or an artist. He pointed to a Lindbergh poster behind the bar and said, ‘Quinn, when are you making your solo to Paris?’ I told him, ‘I’ve got a train ticket to Albany.’ Actually I took a job in Miami, and then Havana was just a short hop.”
“Is your friend famous yet?”
“He’s still in the saloon, monitoring Lindbergh.”
Hemingway smiled, but somberly. He breathed deeply, then again, and his torso seemed to deflate. That exuberance and assurance, so in evidence at the Floridita, was missing.
“Were you writing your Paris book when we barged in?”
“Twenty-six words today,” he said. “Twenty-six.”
“It’s only noon,” Quinn said.
“I got up at six. I should be fishing by now, but I can’t do that either.”
“Here’s something that’ll cheer you up,” Quinn said, and he handed him Cooney’s letter.
Hemingway put on his glasses and Quinn and Renata watched him read. He finished, took off the glasses and squinted at Quinn.
“The Baltimore thrush is a throwback, and I’m a bum. It’s a publicity stunt. What’s this stuff about medals?”
“He was a Marine. He got a Silver Star in the Pacific.”
“Silver Star. We should never underestimate thrushes.”
“Cooney blames you for his friend’s death. He said his head injury from that left hook was why they were still in their hotel room when the soldiers shot at them.”
“Screw that, every inch of it,” Hemingway said, and his exuberance was back. He sat upright and his face tightened. “Am I supposed to get weepy over these tourists who don’t know when to duck? A duel? How about five rounds bareknuckle?”
“Bareknuckle. Are you serious?”
“How do you get serious about the Cooneys of this world?”
“I’m not sure, but he says he’s going public with this.”
“And you’re writing about it.”
“Only if you take him up on it.”
“I couldn’t win a duel with him, even if I killed him.”
“You’ve been challenged to a duel before?”
“Half my life. Cooney says I’m a coward. I spent years facing that one down. But the question is, Doctor Hemingstein, are you afraid to face down a Marine war hero? It’s the cliché of the western. ’Hey, Wild Bill, they say you’re a fast draw. Go for your gun.’ If I back out I was always yellow and I only shoot guns to get it up. I’m very brave when I shoot unarmed ducks. But the truth is everybody’s yellow till they get over it. They’re going to shoot you or shell you or bomb you, so you organize your coward maneuvers and you go AWOL the night before battle, or you run the other way when they start shooting, or you shoot yourself in the foot and they send you on sick call. You know how to get rid of a yellow streak? Stop thinking about what’s next. Think about right now and that you aren’t dead and probably won’t be. You got your weapon. They’re not shooting at you this minute and if they start they may not hit you. If they hit you you’re dead. But who gives a goddamn at that point? Not you. You’re dead. Fuck it. Fuck death. It’s just another goddamn thing you can’t do anything about. Have a drink, climb a tree, shoot a duck, fuck somebody. Don’t worry about it. You’re dead or you’re not, and either way it’s not up to you. Stroke your weapon.”
“Will you duel with Mr. Cooney?” Renata asked him.
“What do you think I should do?”
“I think you shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s beneath you.”
“Thank you. What about you, Mr. Quinn?”
“I like five rounds of bareknuckle. I think you’d take him in three.”
“Two.”
“Then again, maybe one. He does have a glass jaw.”
“Challenge him with a song,” Renata said.
“I’d lose. He’d sing the Marine Hymn.”
“What shall I tell him?” Quinn asked.
“Tell him I’ll pay his doctor bills and buy him a round-trip ticket to Paris. Tell him to stay out of the Floridita. Tell him to watch out for slivers in his ass. Tell him to fuck off, and that I really liked his song.”
“Never apologize, never explain,” Quinn said.
“John Wayne said that, a hell of a writer.”
“What if Cooney won’t go away?”
“Tell him if I wanted to die I wouldn’t let him do it, I’d do it myself. This is a suicidal country, does he know that?”
“I’ll try to send your message.”
“Tell him I don’t want to kill any
body. Tell him my dog died.”
Quinn wanted to see Demajagua, where Céspedes rang the bell and freed his slaves, but there was no time. He had to get to Santiago, settle Renata in at the Casa Granda where she’d stay until she made contact with Felipe Holtz, and then he’d board an army plane ferrying newsmen to the press conference at El Macho, a temporary army base on the south coast. Some forty reporters and photographers would be converging there for this theatrical army venture that had been in the works for weeks, its focus La Plata—the army outpost that Fidel, risen from the dead, had attacked in January. Fidel’s death was old news. His look-alike corpse, which the army took credit for, had been on front pages in December after the disastrous landing of his boat Granma—less a landing than a shipwreck—in a swamp at Playa de Las Coloradas near Niquero. The eighty-two seasick invaders made their way to Alegría de Pío, where the army cornered and killed two-thirds of them, even after surrender, and the survivors fled in chaos into the Sierra Maestra. Silence followed.
Then came dead Fidel and other photogenic corpses.
Then came La Plata, a new army outpost on the Magdalena River near the sea. Two new barracks were being built on a vast estate owned by the Domech family (bordering the Holtz family estate). The barracks were built next to the living quarters of three Mayorales—overseers who as a cadre policed most of the major estates in Oriente (not the Holtz estate), and whose main job was to drive off the Precarista peasants who perennially squatted on the estates. War was perpetual between the Mayorales and Precaristas.
Fifteen soldiers had been assigned to La Plata to track the ragtag Castro rebels, wherever they might be in the Sierra. But the rebels moved first, proving to the world and Batista that they were not dead, attacking the barracks January 16. The army said two soldiers and eight rebels were killed. Six weeks later the army said well, actually, forty rebels died, twenty were taken prisoner, and twelve of our soldiers died.
Now at El Macho Quinn listened as Colonel Pedro Barreras, the commander in Oriente, told reporters that the seriously final count at La Plata was five soldiers killed with knives while they slept, three wounded and left for dead, and three who escaped the rebel knifing. No rebels died. Castro led the attack, so he obviously didn’t die in December, and we think after Niquero he joined a gang of Precaristas in the Sierra, the murderous outlaws who have lived up there for decades, a law unto themselves. They even keep harems, five to ten women for each man.
The army, the Colonel said, now has 566 troops in the Sierra plus 250 intelligence agents in disguise among the peasants. There is no doubt whatever that Castro is no longer in these mountains. Our patrols and planes are covering an area eighteen by nine by nine miles, from Las Mercedes to Manacal to Aji de Guani, “the critical triangle” where Castro has been operating. We have seen no movement and are certain he’s not there. His famous interview with Matthews of The New York Times may have taken place in Cuba but not in the Sierra. And the photo of him holding a rifle with a telescopic sight while Matthews takes notes is obviously a fake.
Quinn asked the Colonel: Who are those outlaws with harems?
Julio Guerrero, said Barreras. Chichi Mendoza, Sergio and Manuel Acuna, and Arsenio Zamora.
Arsenio.
Barreras announced that the army would fly reporters over the critical triangle to prove how serene and rebel-free it was. They would also drive everybody to La Plata. Quinn, with triple credentials—The Havana Post, Time magazine, and The Miami Herald—rode in the second jeep with a Lieutenant Cordero, behind the jeep of Colonel Barreras, who guided the tour over steep and narrow mountain roads. The forest was so dense with an overgrowth of leaves, hanging flora, and a waist-high undergrowth of plants and vines, that sunlight could never reach the ground; so what pilot could see a nest of dug-in rebels through such natural cover?
“Do you find anybody trying to join Castro’s force?” someone asked.
“Nobody is that stupid,” Barreras said. “The army has cut off all traffic to the mountains.”
The Barreras convoy of jeeps and chain-driven lumber trucks, the only vehicles that could navigate these wretched roads, stopped at tiny settlements, none with electricity, to let the press hear peasants talk about their loyalty to Batista (not Castro, as the myth of the day had it), these grateful souls all but genuflecting before the Colonel in praise of the food, medicine, money, and new houses the army had given them.
At the tiny village of La Marea del Portillo Quinn fell back from the press cluster and studied the forest, looking for his grandfather who, in 1870, also set out from Santiago on his journey into rebel domain. A Spanish colonel had told him he could go anywhere in Cuba within Spanish lines; but added with a smile that the army will shoot you with great pleasure as a spy if you cross into Céspedes territory. The officers staging this La Plata playlet today will do the same for anybody trying to see Fidel. But like his grandfather, who made it to Céspedes without getting shot, Quinn was obligated to be here, convinced by a capricious education that he should track what was fundamental; and the fundamentality that was Fidel was now at large in these mountains. That Herbert Matthews of the Times had just been here did not diminish what Quinn was doing. Hemingway might think of it as the left hook after the right cross to prove twice that the hero is alive. Quinn felt exhilarated doing what was in his blood to do. He saw his grandfather—the Cubans called him El Quin—on horseback moving through a plain of high guinea grasses and climbing into these hills.
He was following a trail written out in detail in an anonymous letter to him at his hotel saying, we heard you want to enter Cuba Libre. Was the letter a trap by the Spanish army, or by thieves who knew he traveled with gold? Perhaps, but he was driven to find Céspedes, talk to him and prove his existence, give the lie to the Spaniards who said he was dead, and confront personally this singular fellow who anointed himself as the Cuban messiah and who courted death, avenged it, surrounded himself with the dead, created the dead.
Quinn’s grandfather wore tall boots, a palm-leaf hat, and carried two revolvers and a machete to fend off the marauding robbers the Spaniards warned him about. The warnings were an effort to discourage his daily expeditions toward Cuba Libre; runaway niggers the Spaniards called them, brutal savages, little more than cannibals. He rode four hours to the destination given in the letter, a ceiba tree so large it might have been part of primordial Cuba, and he waited near it till darkness, ready to fight highwaymen with his machete, ready to be shot and found with his pockets inside out. He dismounted and sat in the desolate darkness, nothing to do but trust that all his conversations had made his purpose known and his message had reached the Mambí leaders, who desperately craved the worldwide publicity for their movement that he represented. He could give the lie to the Spaniards’ claim that they had killed most of the rebels and there was no serious war.
Quinn heard a whisper and movement and saw, indistinctly, a man on foot, then, as clouds moved beyond the moon, saw he was brown-skinned, with a straw hat, shirtless, a fragment of tattered linen on his loins. He wore a machete on his side, a cartouche, and a rifle was slung on his back. Quinn spoke the code word mentioned in the letter and then they moved together toward Quinn knew not what—the beginning of something that had taken shape in him long before he ever heard of Céspedes.
Colonel Barreras was telling the news people at La Marea del Portillo about the Batista government’s generosity toward a family of six, and reporters followed him into a rebuilt shack. Quinn walked toward a peasant in tattered clothes who was sitting crosslegged in front of his house, a bohío with thatched roof, earthen floor and two chickens visible inside; and Quinn read in the man’s face something other than gratitude to the army. This house had not been rebuilt. Behind the man sat a near-toothless crone holding a child with what Quinn took to be rickets. The child was drinking water out of a tin can.
“Hola, amigos,” Quinn said to the peasant and his woman. “What did the army do for you?” He spoke in Spanish.
; “They gave me beans and rice.”
“What work do you do up here?”
“There is no work.”
“How do you earn money?”
“There is no money.”
“How do you live, how do you eat?”
“I eat what grows. I cut cane last year and I drove a cane truck, worked in the coffee harvest last year, but not this year.”
“I have a relative who drives a truck up here,” Quinn said. “Arsenio Zamora. Do you know him?”
The man cocked an eye with surprise in it, but said nothing.
“Arsenio Zamora is my wife’s cousin. Renata Rivero from Holguín. Her brother is Alfie Rivero. Renata has not seen Arsenio in two years. She very much wants to see him. They are cousins.”
“Arsenio Zamora has five thousand cousins.”
“My wife would stand out among ten thousand. She is called Renata. She is beautiful and Arsenio will remember her. He has an eye for women. If anybody sees Arsenio please tell him Renata, the sister of Alfie Rivero, wants to see him.”
“I do not know people who see Arsenio.”
“If you do, tell them Renata married a reporter from the Miami Herald.”
“What is reporter?”
“Newpaper man. A writer. Miami newspaper.”
“Newspaper?”
“Okay, olvídalo. My wife is a cousin of Alfie Rivera. Se llama Renata. Prima de Arsenio. ¿Entiende?”
“Prima. She want to see Arsenio?”
“Exactamente. Renata. Cousin of Arsenio.”
Lieutenant Cordero came over to them and asked the man, “What are you telling him?”
“He’s telling me,” Quinn said, “how he cuts sugar cane and harvests coffee for a living, but he didn’t work this month because the army helped him and gave him free food. Él está muy feliz, very happy, verdad, señor?”
The man shrugged an ambiguous yes.
“He is very grateful to the army,” Quinn said.
“We’re moving on,” the lieutenant said to Quinn.
Quinn saluted the cross-legged man and went with the lieutenant.