I wrote another piece I called “Obituary of a Democracy,” about what I’d seen, Jews fleeing for their lives from Germany to Austria, Austria to where now? The Czechs I’d seen beaten to their knees in Nazi-occupied Prague, the haunted-eyed children walking the streets alone, their parents already disappeared into labor camps. Nothing and no one could save any of them now. When I filed the piece, I was sure Collier’s wouldn’t use it, but they did. By the time it saw print, I was finished with Europe, swearing I would never go back. I wrote a long letter to my mother and also one to Eleanor Roosevelt, just trying to get some of it out of my head, the horrors of Kristallnacht, the cowardice I saw everywhere, the corruption, the helplessness, the anguish, the despair. I only felt very sick and weary now. I had no optimism left. I didn’t know what to believe in anymore. “I’ll never regret Spain, though,” I told them both. “It’s the one thing I’m still grateful for.”
Then I fled.
29
Cuba had been Ernest’s private hideaway for many years. When things in Key West grew too hot or his wife and family too demanding, he escaped on his beloved Pilar to the Ambos Mundos in Havana to write. Actually, he kept rooms at two different hotels, working at the Ambos and sleeping and collecting his mail at the Sevilla-Biltmore so that he wasn’t entirely findable on any given day or night, not if he didn’t want to be.
I wasn’t at all comfortable with the symbolism of this arrangement. He had two lives and seemed to function well that way, or perhaps even preferred it. Which left me where, exactly?
Since Barcelona, when I’d given up trying to stay away or be sensible, and let myself dive into loving him, with all the prevailing risks and uncertainties, I had been trying to get a straight answer from him about Pauline. One day he’d tell me he meant to break from her soon, that he was committed to marrying me and bringing his boys to live with us. The next, he’d stall out, seeming confused and asking for more time. I had never seen him be passive about anything, and it terrified me.
“She knows I’m here, doesn’t she?” I asked him just after I arrived in Cuba that February 1939. “She has to.”
He shrugged, only half meeting my eyes. “I understand how awful this is for you, Rabbit, but it’s going to sort itself out soon. I promise.”
“Rabbit” was a new nickname he was trying on me. We were trying it on each other, just as we were trying on this vague, unpredictable kind of love. All the right words were being said, except in limbo. Why did anything have to sort itself out, when he could turn at any moment to face the matter head-on? I didn’t understand why he felt so stuck, so without options when the options seemed obvious.
“It is awful, actually. It feels like you don’t want to make a choice between us.”
“That’s not true. I’m only worried this is all going to be hell for the boys. Things have been one way for a long time. They like routine, even when no one’s happy. At least they know what to expect then.”
“It’s always hard to lose anything,” I said. Privately, I wondered if he wasn’t talking about his own need for routine as much as theirs. Maybe this was a part of our being stuck in no-man’s-land. He loved me, but he had also had Pauline and his sons and Whitehead Street in the picture for so long that perhaps he couldn’t even imagine moving past them toward another life.
“If this divorce takes a long time and things go dark for a while, I hope you don’t give up on me,” he said.
“Don’t give up on me, either. I have just as much to lose.” Even more, I didn’t say.
* * *
—
At least it was warm in purgatory. In the harbor, bright fishing boats danced and bobbed in deep-blue chop. There was a coarse beauty in the disintegrating seawall of the Malecón and the weathered strings of trawling nets, and in the crumbling old buildings along the bay in shades of melting ice cream.
Ernest was eager to show me everything, starting with the Floridita, his favorite bar in Havana, where we sat on corner stools at the bar and drank half-a-dozen daiquiris, cold and tart with a lot of good Cuban rum in them.
They seemed like a wonderful idea at the time, but the next day I woke late, my body overheated and snarled in the sheets. Ernest was gone—because it was morning, and unless the world had somehow tumbled from its axis, he worked every morning—and I was alone at the Sevilla.
I hadn’t paid much if any attention to the room the night before, but now with the sun piercing through the wooden shutters, it was utterly unavoidable. Ernest was a pig. Everywhere I looked there was clutter, chaos, damp towels, debris. On top of the bureau, an open tackle box spilled lures over a pile of soiled shirts and socks. Every other available flat surface was covered with newspapers and darkened coffee cups, laundry, and tented books and scraps of food. Just as he had in Spain, he kept a larder in his room—tins of sardines and peaches, overripe bananas, hard cheese, half-empty bottles of red table wine. The habit had made sense in Madrid, where the siege had made even bread and beans hard to come by, but here it felt like laziness, plain and simple.
Sighing, I tried to get out of bed and nearly stumbled over a large cured ham that was only loosely covered in cheesecloth. Ham, on the floor. That was the last straw. It didn’t matter how ill I felt, my head full of cotton and droning bees, I had to get out of there. Digging to find some aspirin tablets and space enough to bathe, I tidied myself up as well as I could, threw on a white skirt and espadrilles and sunglasses, and headed out to find some dense Cuban coffee, and some peace.
* * *
—
“You aren’t really proposing we live in that hotel together,” I said to Ernest later, once he’d finished work for the day. We were in a café, and he was shoveling in smoked trout and onions and bread and wine and hard, sharp Spanish cheese. Still green to the gills, I could barely stomach a boiled egg and toast.
“Why not? It’s not so different from Madrid and you didn’t seem to mind then.”
“I did mind, though, and that was war.”
“We’ll have the maid come more often.”
“She can take away the newspapers, but it will still reek of meat in there, and baitfish. And stale ashtrays. I want a real place.”
“This is fine for a while, isn’t it? You don’t have to have everything scrubbed with Dutch cleanser for you to be happy, do you? Nothing’s clear about money right now, anyway. What if Fife fights me for everything I’ve got?”
I felt myself flinching at his nickname for Pauline, but knew better than to mention it. What could I possibly say? When you took away geography and hope, she was still very much his wife. “I’m not unusually clean, you know,” I told him. “I’m as tidy as any normal person.”
“I see. And I’m unusually, abnormally untidy. Is that where this is going?”
But I didn’t want to quarrel or be baited. “Listen. I’ve come halfway around the world to be here, and none of it’s on my terms. I can’t just sit waiting for you in the corner of a hotel room, don’t you see?”
“You’ll be writing.”
“I need a space of my own. I’m prepared to pay for more. I’ll do all the looking, too. You don’t have to think of it at all.”
* * *
—
I began my search the next day, and instantly felt better, just to be exercising any degree of control over my fate. I hired an agent, who showed me a string of small, acceptable houses in town, with neatly swept verandas and tiled breakfast rooms, and yards shaded with banyan trees. Some were even charming, but I felt nothing for any of them until we drove out of central Havana, past the dirty and smoke-encrusted parts of town that seemed to have been forgotten by everyone, and then up into the hills toward San Francisco de Paula, with its one dusty street of tiny shops and tumbledown fruit stands. Finally we stopped on a rounded sort of hill in front of a creaky, rusted gate with a chain. Beyond the chain, I saw only pure wildness. He
re?
There were fifteen acres, the agent said, but it was hard to see much of anything with all the overgrowth. The house, when we reached it, was Spanish-style and looked abandoned. Thick vines strangled the peeling yellow shutters, parts of the roofline, and the terrace. A dilapidated tennis court sat behind, and there was a drained pool full of sand and empty gin bottles and tin cans. I should have run screaming, but the place had the feel of a fable. I couldn’t say why exactly, but I had an instinct that something wonderful lay just under the surface, only lightly sleeping, like a kingdom cursed by a witch and waiting not for a prince but for me. For us.
La Finca Vigía, it was called—“Watchtower Farm”—and no one had lived there for many years. Inside, the rooms smelled close and old and mildewy, and all the furniture needed to be burned. There were cockroaches in the kitchen, and years of dust built up, and so much to do everywhere. But if I squinted, I could picture myself writing in one of the bedrooms off the main sitting room, and Ernest hammering away at his typewriter in some other part of the house. We would be two writers under one roof, hiding away from everything but each other and our work.
“The view at least won’t need repairs,” the agent said when we were behind the house on another wild terrace, gazing down the vine-matted slope toward Havana. The pink and yellow and white buildings along the waterfront were like something out of a painting, but it was the enormous ceiba tree rooted to the front steps of the house that really had my attention. It had grown up and through the foundation and now seemed firmly part of everything, body and soul. The tree had thick and fleshy leaves, so green they looked almost oily, and clusters of chestnut-colored pods. The trunk was like rhinoceros hide, thick and leathery and substantial—and everything about the tree added up to move me almost to tears, though I couldn’t have explained why to anyone, not even myself.
“I’ll take it,” I told the agent before reason could sink in. I meant the ceiba, but also every speck of dirt and cobweb and nest of dried leaves. Possessions had never appealed to me, and neither had permanence. But the war had forced me to rethink all sorts of things, and so had love. Time was different. Each day seemed charged and priceless now. Who knew how many years or even months anyone had left to live simply, just as they chose, with all this violence and struggle, whole countries crumbling under hate. So why not stake a claim while I still could? For myself, and also for Ernest, whether or not he understood its value yet.
* * *
—
The next afternoon when he was finished writing for the day I directed Ernest out of the city to take a look at the farm. I showed him the ceiba tree and all the other marvels—the slope behind the pool house that had eighteen different kinds of mango trees, the sun-dazzled terrace and mimosas, and the trellis heavily bowed with fuchsia- and apricot-colored blooms—hoping he could see through the chaos to how happy we’d be here.
“There’s a lot of land. But the rent’s a hundred a month, you say?” He was paying just a few dollars a day in town.
“I’m writing the checks, you remember.”
“You mean Collier’s is writing the checks.”
He was right. I’d been paid well for the pieces I’d filed from France and England and Czechoslovakia. “You’re being a mule,” I told him. “Come look at my favorite tree in the world again.”
“What about the house?” He pointed to where the wan yellow paint was peeling in rubbery sheets to reveal the limestone beneath.
“Paint is nothing. We can choose any color we like.”
“And the pool? There must be two feet of garbage in there. It smells like hell. The tennis court looks like an earthquake socked it in the face. The well is dry. I don’t know what you’re thinking. We should be sprinting back to town.”
“That’s just lack of care is all. No one’s been here for ages. I plan to love it indecently.”
“Love has nothing to do with real estate.” He turned to walk back toward the car.
“Rabbit,” I said to his back. I was rooted to the path, my feet planted.
“Yes?” he asked without stopping.
“Let me try. I need this. I’m going to do it.”
30
In the middle of March, Ernest went back to the mainland on Pilar to see his family and most especially his eldest, Bumby, who was visiting over his school holiday. The moment he was out of sight, I hired workers from the village nearby, and we dug in. I decided it felt less terrifying, and less domestic, to begin outside, so the pool was unearthed first, like some ancient and derelict archaeological site. After the soil and debris were cleared away, the basin was a puzzle of jagged cracks, all needing to be patched. It seemed hopeless to me, but one day, when the structure was finally sound, and everything bleached white and painted and tiled, the workmen filled it with seawater, and I stood rooted, nearly mesmerized by the diamond glint of sunlight on the surface. It was blindingly beautiful and such an unlikely revival that it galvanized me for the work ahead.
And there was much of it. The tennis court needed reclaiming from the jungle, the vines beaten back, the bird and animal droppings shoveled away, and the entire surface and net replaced. The new surface was the shade of a well-fed flamingo, a color that made me so happy to look at I decided the house should go pink, too—a lovely soft ash pink that was like something belonging to Spain. Next, two gardeners came to liberate the terrace and tame the utter chaos of the yard little by little, bit by bit.
The place did feel truly magical. It shimmered with peace and serenity, even if I didn’t yet. Once the interior of the house had been tackled, the plaster walls repaired and painted, the windows replaced, the curtains mended, I scrubbed floors with manic energy, fixing new paper to the kitchen shelves and drawers, attacking cobwebs with a stiff Cuban straw broom, while some part of me stood to one side, dizzy with fear and doubt and uncertainty—the vertigo of extreme transformation.
It wasn’t at all typical, Ernest was right, for me to care about a place—an address, a plot of land. But everything had changed for me with the loss of Spain. The whole world was changing, and now the only thing that made any sense at all was to cling to anything that was good about life. A house on a hillside. A man who loved you, even if he couldn’t tell you what tomorrow would bring.
More than a year had passed since Pauline had confronted Ernest in Paris about me. She had to know I was still in the picture, but she seemed determined to bury her head, to blind herself to every sign. They lived apart and called it a holiday for Ernest. A writing retreat. And he was just as culpable as she was in the lie.
All I could do was hope that at some point his central loyalty would shift to me. This house could help, I knew. If I threw everything into it, he would see how absolutely wonderful our life could be together. Two writers under one roof, hidden away from everything that no longer made sense. A home off the map, at the far side of the world. Our foxhole. The most beautiful foxhole that ever was.
* * *
—
I ordered a bed and table and other study furniture from a carpenter I found in the village. I brought in sheets and lamps and crockery, linen napkins and bath mats—and tried to stay focused on the tasks that needed to be accomplished, and not let myself think too much or smoke too much, or pace the terrace after dark. This had to work. It had to, so it would.
In three weeks, all the repairs were done and the workmen gone, and I was alone in the house. I poured a tall whiskey over ice and had a long bath and walked through the empty rooms in my pajamas, catching my reflection in the windows now and then and wondering, each time, for just a moment, Who is that woman?
This was all new, and I was shedding my skin, not quite the person I’d been before, and not yet who I wanted to be. I slept uneasily, unsure of where to rest in the large bed, and hearing the sharp almost metallic sounds of geckos chirruping in the eaves. I tossed and turned, and woke at dawn
feeling thick and morose, a dark mood loitering like storm clouds. Without even making coffee, I went outside and sat on the front steps in my bare feet.
I was rarely up so early, and couldn’t remember the sky ever being so pale and pearl colored and cottony. Spring heat pulsed from above and below. Great skeins of morning birds were speeding headlong over the treetops, backward and sideways, diving without fear toward their breakfast of gnats. Somehow the morning was louder than the night, here. The jungle around me seemed to exhale the sound of insects, billions and billions of them, holding up the trees invisibly with their music. The palms rattled. The round-faced spider monkeys crashed from bamboo to bamboo—and all of it was alive and insistent, hammering the same message over and over, about risk and hope, and where those two things met in me.
I was terrified of losing Ernest to Pauline—yes. I could go on gathering all the feathers for this nest only to find he didn’t have it in him to leave her. I was just as terrified that even if he did finally choose me, our love wouldn’t be the lasting kind. Yes, that could happen, too.
Just before me was the ceiba tree, gnarled and magnificent from every angle, old as an elephant graveyard. The tree was the keeper of the house, the witness for all that had come before. And it seemed to be saying, with its very rootedness and ancient patience, that my worries weren’t extraordinary or unforgivable. This was an old story. The oldest on record. I had everything to lose, and also everything to gain—like any woman struggling with herself in love.
I went back inside, where all was clean and soothing and quiet—awash with morning sun. I brewed coffee in the new percolator, poured it into a new enamel cup, and went into the room I would be using as my office. Not a single book stood on the shelf yet. I hadn’t written a word in the house, not a telegram, not even a letter to my mother. In all this silence, it was up to me to sound the gong. No one else could do it for me. I pulled one of the new, stiff mahogany dining chairs over to a small table, and dug through boxes until I found paper and pencils and my typewriter. I snapped a blank page into the roller, sending a sharp report echoing through the house. The page was snowy white. It still held all of its secrets. There was nothing to do but begin.