31
From our back terrace at the Finca, we could look down onto Havana like minor gods from Olympus, the pale pink-yellow blur of it by day and the smear of twinkling lights after dark. No cars came by unless they were invited to come, and the quiet was like a dream, or like a spell.
I had chosen the house specifically for its distance from town. But though Ernest appreciated that, too, he insisted on keeping his writing room and mailing address at the Ambos Mundos.
“It doesn’t mean anything terrible, Rabbit,” he said when I felt wounded. “I have my habits, that’s all. You’ve done a wonderful job with the place. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”
“Good,” I told him, pushing away doubt as hard as I could. “Neither do I.”
* * *
—
And so began the season of two writers writing under one roof. Ernest told Pauline he was staying in Cuba for the unforeseeable future and wasn’t seeing any friends or guests. Then he put down roots made of words. He chose our bedroom for his writing space, beginning at first light each morning, at the standing desk he’d made out of a bookcase. Everything that he needed was there, well-sharpened pencils and the wooden reading board he used to hold each blank page when he was writing longhand. The typewriter he turned to when things were going particularly fast and well, and the chart he always kept of each day’s word count. It was a good place for him, just before the south-facing window. I would often wake and lie still for a long time with my eyes closed, listening to the rhythm of his pencil on the page, and the bees in the flowering jacaranda beyond him, dizzy with their own industry. When I rose, I didn’t stop to speak to him and he didn’t speak to me—something we agreed was important for mornings, and for writing.
I would pad downstairs to have coffee at my own desk, with bright sun flaring over the smooth tile floor and onto the golden wood of the new bookcase. We had hired two young boys from the village, Fico to cook, and Rene to manage the house. One or the other would leave a tray for me with a poached egg and toast, and small rounded pots of butter and fig jam. I would eat and feel warm as a cat, knowing that hours and hours stretched out in front of me.
I had returned to my notebooks and the instinct to write about Spain while it was all still fresh and sharp for me. If I could find the right characters, and a way to truly set down what I’d seen and felt in Madrid, I believed I could build on the success of my second book and maybe even make something extraordinary. Something that wouldn’t dissolve with a whimper, or mock me for having literary dreams—but last, even after my death, and speak the truth about this war.
I sat at my desk every day, courting inspiration, setting down hopeful sentences and bits of dialogue. “Five-finger exercises,” Ernest called this phase of the writing process.
“Think of it that way, like piano scales,” he had explained early on, when he was still assuming the role of my teacher. “You have to keep the muscles flexible and the mind, too, and then when something really comes, you’ll be ready for it.”
I was still very much waiting for that something to take me over, and trying not to think about Ernest’s marriage. Every few days, when he collected his mail, Ernest would get updates from Whitehead Street, notes from Pauline and the boys. I was dying to read hers, to know how things really stood for her, but even the idea of doing that was dangerous and self-destructive.
Meanwhile, he was on fire with a new novel. There were no five-finger exercises for him now, but rather a volcano thrusting up under the surface of everything and taking him over.
“At first I thought it was a story,” he told me late one night when we were wrapped around each other in our big good bed, my leg flung over his waist, his hands caught in my hair. “But they’re chapters. I think I’ve started the war novel I’ve meant to do. I know I have, actually. I’ve been worried to even say to myself what I’m up to. Something special is happening. The words keep coming, and I look up and I don’t know where I am, or where I’ve been.”
“Really, Rabbit? That’s wonderful.” It was—for him. But terrible for me. Of course he would be writing of Spain, too, I chided myself in the dark. And do it better than I could ever hope to. Jealousy came so sharply and appallingly that I wanted to slink away under the porch somewhere and begin to gnaw on my own liver. I was still waiting and praying to hit on the right story for my book, while he seemed to fall there naturally, as if it were a God-given state of being. Where is my volcano? I wanted to rail, but couldn’t. It was too small-minded, and he was too happy. So I said, “God, I’m thrilled for you. Isn’t that the best feeling?”
“There isn’t anything better. I have the sense there isn’t a bottom to any of it. That I can just throw my line down day after day, and the words will be there.”
“How glorious for you.” I swallowed hard, pinching the bitterness back, and fixed my eyes on the shadowy ceiling. My book could still catch fire. Any day now that could happen. “Have you told Max yet?”
“No, I won’t for a while, either. It’s all too new.”
“I know what you mean. It’s a little like whispering in a house just after a baby is born. You don’t want to wake it up.”
“That’s exactly it,” he said. “I want the damned thing to go on sleeping just this soundly until it’s walking.”
We weren’t in competition, I tried to tell myself. It only felt that way because we were working in the same house, in plain sight of the other’s fire pit. If it happened to be his turn to blaze now, my chance was surely coming. In the meantime, I would lean in close and warm my hands and smile for him. And love him.
32
June arrived with pulsing heat and the feel of storms that gathered and pressed at the edges of our view but rarely arrived. Ernest’s book was coming like a freight train. He was writing as steadily and as well as he ever had, and he thought that if he could keep up this pace, he might have a finished manuscript by summer’s end.
“It all happens in three days,” he said of the action. “And yet it feels like all of history is in those days, and that Jordan is everyone who has ever lived. I made him up, but he feels more real to me than almost anyone right now.”
Robert Jordan was the novel’s hero, an American munitions expert sent to blow a bridge and derail a Republican attack in the Guadarrama Mountains. I recognized immediately that he was based partly on Robert Merriman, and that the attack was a reimagining of a real battle, at La Granja, which had failed just after we’d left Spain the first time.
But that was just logistics. In the truest sense, the battle and this bridge were entirely Ernest’s. The world of the book came barreling out of his imagination, so densely and fully realized that it was a bit of a shock to read his pages when he offered them, even a few at a time—like being slapped with absolute reality. I could smell the pine-needled floor of the forest, and hear the stream that ran along the side of the narrow road, and feel the sunlight as it pierced the canopy and fell on the steep mountainside. He’d put me there.
But when I went to my own desk, and tried to find my Spain, words mysteriously retreated. It should have been no strain to reach for that time. I thought of it every day, didn’t I? But the sentences wouldn’t come toward me when I called. I felt terrifyingly inadequate and tried not to panic.
“You know the girl Maria?” Ernest said one evening. We were on the terrace nursing a few scotches before dinner. The worst of the heat was gone, and the air was moist and heavy enough to lean on. Maybe it would rain later, or maybe it wouldn’t. The result would be nearly the same.
“Yes, she’s heartbreaking, isn’t she? She’s so wonderfully drawn, Rabbit. Really. It’s magic what you can do with people.”
“She’s not modeled after you exactly,” he went on. “But she has your toughness mixed with softness. And all the stuff I write about loving someone. Well, that’s you. I can only write it because I have you no
w.”
“Your book is going to be magnificent.”
“I have to be careful not to go too quickly, or I could lose it all.”
“You won’t.” As I said it, I knew it was true. A gathering up was happening in him. Anyone could feel that, and know that something extraordinary was taking place. He’s writing the book of his life, I thought with a start, and willed my jealousy away. “You can’t lose it. It’s in you too deep for that.”
“Maybe so.” His voice softened, sounding bruised. “I hope so.” Then he said, “I’ve given Maria your hair.”
“I thought she was Spanish.”
“She is, and she has hair like a wheat field.” He sipped at his scotch, which was pale with melting ice, and said, “She belongs to you, too. The book is ours. It’s us.”
How I wanted to hold on to that, to believe it was true.
* * *
—
When I sat down at my desk the next morning, I realized that I had to let my own Spain idea go. If I didn’t, I would always be measuring his work against mine, and coming up short. There was already enough anxiety and uncertainty in my life. I didn’t need that, too. So I moved my characters to Prague instead of Madrid—and that seemed to solve something. My heroine was an American journalist very like myself, sent to write about the war only to fall hopelessly in love with a man she absolutely shouldn’t want, but does. That was a story I knew, surely. And if I couldn’t reach or even aspire to graze Ernest’s talent with my fingertips, I could match him in terms of tenacity, and not give up on this book. Not if it took everything I had.
Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn’t look up and didn’t stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.
33
All through that summer while the heat blazed and the thunderstorms crashed in and out again, and our mangoes ripened and disappeared in the night, carried off by who knows what sort of animal, we traded pages and nursed each other’s ideas, and it was exactly as I’d hoped. His book was mine, and mine was his, and I felt more than I ever thought was possible—perhaps for the first time ever, truly—that I wasn’t alone.
Each afternoon, when work was behind us, we played tennis on the newly resurfaced court, even in the full heat of the day, sweating out the toxins of too much thinking, and then swam until our shoulders were sore. At least one night a week, we blew off steam in Havana, settling along the bar of the Floridita, onto stools that seemed to always be waiting for us, reserved with our invisibly stenciled names. After a difficult day, it was wonderful to be in town, to see friends and be light. We loved all the little shops and cafés, the old aunties who sat on benches in their smocks and woven hats. We loved the boys with their white T-shirts and smooth dark hair, the loose way they walked, sometimes smoking, sometimes laughing, alive with youth and looking for trouble.
At dusk, negritos came from the cane fields in huge clouds, blurring the sky until they settled in the laurel trees on the Plaza de Armas. Their droppings painted everything that had collected beneath the trees during the day, cigarette butts and the flamed-out tips of matches, bits of paper and wrappers, and even the creamy tangle of someone’s panties. Each morning, the old women would come with their straw brooms and stoop in their patient way, one square of earth at a time, and make it all new again.
* * *
—
We liked to walk along the Prado through Old Havana, past the strains of moody tango music from the dance clubs, the street hustlers, and the smell of rum, and the tight hollow leathery pops of the batá drums. We often strolled along the Malecón, too, and one evening came to a narrow and mostly bare park where a game was being played in the dimming light. A group of men faced a wall and swatted a small leather ball against it with surprising accuracy, stooping and pivoting, their feet fast and light. They seemed to be aware of one another’s bodies naturally and blindly, like a kind of invisible choreography.
“It’s pelota,” Ernest told me. “A Basque game. I used to watch them play in San Sebastián. It’s bloody wonderful, actually. I’ve heard it’s the fastest game in the world.”
“Let’s stay awhile. I think they’re beautiful.”
They were. Running almost soundlessly along the clay, their arms swept out as if they could fly. Maybe they could.
We found a bench and watched the end of their game. There were teams, it appeared, and various ways of using the wall and bouncing the ball back to challenge the others—but all of it moved at such speed, I found myself focusing on the glowing white of their shirts, and the lightning-fast hazy shapes their arms made scooping the ball around and forward again, and on their legs, which never stopped moving, pantherlike, in the dark.
When darkness finally pushed in, and the game broke up, Ernest started a conversation with the players. There were six of them, of various heights and ages, though I guessed all were younger than Ernest, and they looked healthy and fit from the seriousness of their game. Before long we’d learned they were Basque, and that they’d come to Havana when Franco took Bilbao. They’d fought side by side in Loyalist brigades, and when Spain began to fail, to fall, they came here.
They were in exile, I understood sharply, and felt a kinship with them. Ernest and I were exiles, too, though we’d chosen it. They hadn’t. “You must miss your home very much,” I said.
“Franco took everything that was good from Spain,” said one of the players. “How can you miss what no longer exists?” He was a little taller than the others, with a thick head of very black hair and a round face that looked ageless and untouched somehow. His name was Francisco Ibarlucia, he told us, but we should call him Paxtchi.
“What about your families?”
“We try not to speak of the past,” another man, Juan, said. “Anyway, we are family.” He appeared younger, perhaps twenty-five, with delicately drawn features and thick black eyelashes.
We told them a little of our time in Spain. They had known other journalists who had lived as we had, focused on the Republic and la causa, and so they seemed to understand us immediately, and we them. In the darkened street, Ernest motioned to a nearby hotel. “Come and have a drink with us.”
“You shall drink with us,” Paxtchi said, “it is Felix’s birthday.” He gestured at a handsome young man with narrowly set black eyes and a wonderfully hooked nose. “It’s a sin not to celebrate.”
“I try to be more direct when I sin,” Ernest said cheerfully, and we followed the men to a small house off the Calle Campanario, where they all seemed to be living as one, with dozens of shoes piled by the door. It was all very snug and real—just the kind of place Ernest liked, where people lived simply. They had enough. They were together.
Off the back of the house, there was a small veranda with benches where we sat in the changing glow of candlelight while the men brought straw-bound casks of rich red wine. The casks had woven straw handles, and they had a way of hooking a finger and tipping the flask against the back of a bent arm, all in one motion, like a well-oiled dance. They managed to do it without spilling a drop.
Ernest already knew the method, had perfected it in another life, as I should have guessed. There was also patxaran to drink, a homemade liquor with a complex taste of blackberries and coffee and cinnamon, which we passed around, taking small thimblefuls in pinched cups. I liked it too much, and before I knew it we were all very drunk, the Basques singing mournful tunes, their voices rising and falling and running together, and then everyone growing silent while one picked up the notes and sent them out, ringing and clear.
Felix, whom everyone called Ermua, sang the truest, I thought. When I tried to tell him how wonderful he was, he shrugged and
said, “Normal, normal.” But I thought I saw his shoulders lift perceptibly, and his eyes told me even more emphatically that he knew he had a gift, and that it was anything but ordinary.
Each of the songs sounded sad and complete and hopeful all at once, and several times I felt a ridge of gooseflesh run up my spine and the back of my neck. One must have been a favorite of everyone, because they sang it over and over. At some point, the words caught and sank in, and I began to repeat them, though the Basque syllables were as strange as the patxaran on my tongue.
Baina honela
ez zen gehiago txoria izango
Baina honela
ez zen gehiago txoria izango
Eta nik,
txoria nuen maite
Eta nik eta nik,
txoria nuen maite
“The word maite,” I guessed aloud to Ermua, when there was silence later, “that’s ‘love,’ isn’t it?”
“It is, yes. It’s a very old song, this one.” He sang a few more lines, like an angel. “It’s about a man who has lost a beautiful bird he loved and wonders if he should have cut her wings to keep her,” he continued, translating for me. “But then he realizes she wouldn’t have been the same bird if he had. In trying to keep her he would have changed her.”