On this warm
and humid May morning as I stand in the foyer of Finca Vigia [pronounced: finka vee-hee-ya] meaning
lookout farm, that was Ernest Hemingway’s home in Havana, Cuba, between 1939
and 1960, I thought of that fateful morning of July 2, 1961, the day Hemingway
rose from his bed and committed suicide. He woke up in his Idaho home around
seven in the morning, took care not to wake up his wife, then chose from his
wardrobe one of his favorite dressing gowns that he called the “emperor’s
robe,” went to the foyer, pointed a shotgun to his head and pulled its trigger
ending his life.
Little is known about the twenty-two years that Ernest Hemingway
spent in Cuba. Martha Gelhorn, his third wife, came to Cuba in 1939 to be with
him and got tired of living in the small room in the Ambos Mundos hotel that he
had been renting. So she rented the Finca about ten miles east of Havana on a
hill. Located on about 13 acres of land, the house was originally built in 1886
by a Catalan architect, Miguel Pascual y Baguer. Hemingway and Gelhorn rented
Finca Vigia for about $100 a month for one year, and then bought the property
in 1940 for twelve thousand five hundred dollars in cash - royalties from his
book, For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was in the Finca that Hemingway wrote
a number of his works - For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and into
the Trees, A Moveable Feast, The Old Man and the Sea, and Islands in the
Stream.
Hemingway visited Cuba almost a dozen times before he bought
Finca Vigia. He came to Havana for the first time in 1928, on board an English
ship Orita that had sailed from La Rochelle, France, bound for Key West for a
two-week journey. Orita stopped in Havana for two days. He got off the ship and
toured old Havana. He had been married to his second wife, Pauline Marie
Pfeiffer, for about eleven months and she was pregnant. He was 29 and not yet
famous. He wandered around old Havana, saw the American embassy, the Ambos
Mundos hotel and liked the ambiance and decided that he would come back.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes that it was not a case of love at first sight,
but a slow, arduous process whose intimacies appear scattered and in code
throughout most of his works later.
Ana Elena, our official Cuban tour guide for the University of
Texas at San Antonio, tells us that when Hemingway went to Finca Vigia for the
first time, he saw a bunch of kids by the gate. Hemingway spoke Spanish, and so
he asked the kids what they were doing and they said they were trying to find a
place where they could play baseball. They could not go into the Finca because
people in the Finca would sic their dogs on them. Hemingway looked through the
gate and told the kids, When I come to live here, I will let you play baseball
here and you will be able to eat fruit. He said, I will let you eat the fruit
from the ground. You cannot throw stones at the fruit. The Finca had over 100
mango trees. He also asked them when his own children came to the Finca, if
they would agree to teach them to play baseball. The kids became very good
friends with Hemingway. He sponsored the children. He would play baseball with
them. Hemingway told them to go ask their moms about their sizes and he ordered
uniforms for the baseball team. Hemingway’s son’s name was Gregory, and his
nickname was Gigi, and the baseball team came to be known as Las Estrellas
de Gigi or Gigi’s Stars. As far as one knows, this was the first children’s
baseball team in the whole municipality of San Francisco de Paula where the
Finca is located.
Today, one cannot go
inside the house. The Cuban government adopted that decision in 1980 for both
security and conservation reasons. You can look inside each room only from the
outside. As I crane my neck inside several rooms, the question of Hemingway’s
suicide comes back to me. From the foyer, I first peer into the big living
room.
The living room is
nearly fifty feet in length and has high ceiling like most of the rooms and the
wall color is white. The tiles are light cream. The room has several sofas and
armchairs with floral designs. I notice an elaborate arrangement of bottles of
wine, rum, whiskey and other liquors on a coffee table that is behind the two
single sofas.
It is well known that
Hemingway suffered from alcohol dependence. He had started drinking in his
youth, and often would stay up all night drinking and reading poetry. The
drinking was channeled into great creative energy. In 1924, his first wife,
Hadley, found him in a state of euphoria in which he wrote seven short stories.
He went to a doctor in 1937, complaining of stomach pains and tests detected
liver damage. He was told to give up alcohol but he refused. In 1944 as a war
correspondent in England he suffered severe concussion to his head in a car
accident on his way back from a party thrown by photographer Robert Capa and
all passengers including him were intoxicated. He required 57 stitches.
Anthony Burgess
writes that the manager of the Gritti Palace in Venice told him once that three
bottles of Valpolicella first thing in the morning were nothing to Hemingway.
Then there are the daquiris, Scotch, tequila, bourbon, martinis etc. Several
biographers have also speculated that he most likely inherited a genetic
predisposition for mood disorders. The excessive drinking that led to many
injuries, combined with mood disorders only made matters worse and in later
life, predisposed him to the severe psychotic episodes and cognitive decline.
In the next room on
the walls I spot several photographs of Hemingway’s family. You could see,
pictures of his parents and siblings. In his A Moveable Feast, in an
essay on Ezra Pound, Hemingway writes that families have many ways of being
dangerous. His own family was dangerous to him in imparting a terrible genetic
heritage. His father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, suffered from drastic mood swings
and episodes of depression. On December 6, 1928, burdened with financial debt
and bad physical health, he committed suicide with a gunshot to the head. His
mother, Grace, suffered from insomnia. Hemingway’s sister, Ursula and brother,
Leicester, committed suicide.
Another sister,
Marcelline, suffered from periods of depression, and when she died prematurely
in 1963 many in her family suspected suicide. Hemingway’s own son, Gregory
(Gigi) after whom he named the children’s baseball team, was a physician but
suffered from bipolar disorder. He struggled with substance abuse and lost his
medical license. Gregory underwent sex change operation before his death in
2001, and died of natural causes in a jail cell in Miami incarcerated after
being found naked in public. Hemingway could not escape the curse of his genes.
He wrote to his mother-in-law in 1936: “Had never had the real old melancholia
before and am glad to have had it so I know what people go through. It makes me
more tolerant of what happened to my father.” In another letter he described
his depression: “I felt that gigantic bloody emptiness and nothingness. Like
couldn’t ever fuck, fight, write, and was all for death.” Thus the common
feelings of depression, emptiness and thoughts of death and suicide were
constant factors that haunted him throughout his life and eventually led to his
suicide.
The
idea of death became a constant factor in Hemingway’s life and art. His stories
and novels contained themes of violence and suicide. His 1933 short story, A
Clean, Well-Lighted Place, talks about an old man who tried to commit
suicide out of despair. Many of his letters carry references to his future
suicide. When he was not thinking of his own death, he was putting himself in
situations of danger and combat as though he wanted to accelerate it. His
participation in several wars and rebellions, bull-fighting in Spain, hunting
in Africa, fishing in Havana in his favorite boat Pilar, now also on display in
the Finca next to the empty swimming pool– these were perhaps his ways of
throwing himself toward death. He once told actress Ava Gardner, “I spend a
hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish, so I won’t kill myself.” He was
wrong. He did.