The Hemingway Notes

It was the sand flea's bite that woke me. The flea bit me in a place that I couldn't scratch. A humid breeze moved across my body. I heard the rustle of palm fronds overhead and the soft sound of surf slapping the beach. The sky was the gentle color of a robin's egg. I looked at Denny. At first I thought he had brown sugar on his face, and then realized it was sand mixed into the stubble of his facial hair. It had only been twenty-four hours since we'd shaved, but on Denny it looked like a week's worth of growth; I only had some peach fuzz. I could go two or three days without shaving. Denny had told me he started shaving at the age of fourteen. He could have a five-o'clock shadow by noon.

            I peeled off my shirt and dropped my long pants; my bathing suit also served as underwear. I took off for a swim in the warm ocean. When I came out of the water, Denny was awake and sitting up.

            "What are you doing?" he asked.

            "What does it look like? I took a bath," I replied.

            "That was stupid. Now you're going to have salt on your body all day. Come on, we've gotta get going. We have no idea where Finca Vigia is. Just that it's on the other side of Havana somewhere," Denny said.

            We stumbled through the city until we found a friendly English speaker who directed us to a bus that would take us the nine miles to the village of San Francisco de Paula where we would find Hemingway. The bus ride was its own adventure, complete with chickens and one small pig. No one in the village spoke English, but they understood the word "Hemingway" and pointed us to a farmhouse on a hilltop. We walked up a long path to the front of a large, vine-covered, single-floor house. A white three-story structure that looked like an air traffic control tower stood next to the house.

            "What do you think Finca Vigia means?" I asked.

            "I don't know, probably means figs and vegetables in Spanish," said Denny.

            As we reached the entrance of the house, we could hear the clacking of typewriter keys. We looked though the screen door and saw Hemingway, his back to us, standing at a bookcase and typing. Denny tapped on the screen door.

            "Renee!" Hemingway shouted, "Renee!"

            "What'd he say?" I asked.

            "He's speaking Spanish. I think it means enter," Denny said.

            Denny opened the door and we walked into cries of, "No! No!" coming from the housekeeper. She stopped us after we'd gotten halfway across the room. She was furious. Her teeth bared in a snarl like a feral dog. Hemingway, wearing only khaki shorts with the fly open, stood glaring at us. I wanted to tell him about his zipper, but didn't think it was a good time.

            "Renee, I told you no college kids in the house. Send them away," Hemingway said.

            "Oh but, Mr. Hemingway, I have a letter of introduction. It's from our literature professor. He said he was a friend of yours and you'd let us interview you for our college newspaper," Denny said, as he pulled the letter out of his valise.  

            Renee snatched the letter from Denny's hand like it was a ten-dollar bill, and carried it across the room to Hemingway. He opened it, his lips moving as he silently read to himself. Then he muttered something that sounded like, "Damn it to hell, my biographer."

            He cast us an annoyed glance, then look to his housekeeper and said, "Renee, take the boys to the pool and let them have a swim. I'll be down after I finish writing."