A trace of ink long from Venice to Havana

Published: 2008 - April/May, Venetian Itinerary, Culture

There are lives rooted in the earth, others belonging to legends, few suspended between myth and reality. One of these is that of Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest writers of modern times, who knew how, through the same strength, to clinch in his hands a Nobel Prize as well as a glass of good rum. His fame is tied to the many literary masterpieces he left for posterity, to his reckless life and obsessive passion for travels, which incited him to move about half of the world, even when his health conditions worsened dangerously.
Venice and Havana: separated by 8,400 kilometers, and by history and culture almost opposite. But yet in the life of Hemingway there is a connecting thread that unites them, perhaps a thin one, perhaps made of colors or people living in the streets, by the rarefied atmosphere that invites to meditation and inspiration or perhaps by that common sense of standing still in spite of the passing of time.
“Papa” in Cuba lived for almost 20 years, especially the last ones marked by his illness, in Venice he came in 1948 and then from 1952, several times, until 1954 and in both places he wrote some of his most famous novels (“ The man and the sea”, “for whom the bell toll”, “across the river and into the trees” “islands in the stream” “to have and have not”), so to render almost immortal the cities in which he lived or worked, rather than the pages that because of  those places came to life.
In the Habanera capital the traces and ghosts of Hemingway are still today well visible on the walls of the famous place “Bodeguita del Medio” where, amongst thousands of famous faces and anonymous phrases, stands out the portrait of the writer made by the artist Sergio Carboni. There he loved to sip on the Mojito, today a cult drink of the Caribbean culture, too often watered down by the hurry of inexpert bartenders. To the pleasures of life the writer dedicated himself also in other places of the island, like the “Terraza Cojimar” of the Hotel Ambos Mundo, the  seafront Malecòn or the “Finca Vigia”, the house he bought with his first earnings as a wedding present for his wife Martha, in which he lived until the year of his death and where today still can be found, in addition to the mythical fishing boat “El Pilar”, with which he used to go fishing for blue marlins, and stories to be told, even an invaluable wealth of about 9,000 books, magazines, vinyl records and letters. And are just the properties owned by the writer that  have become,  with the passing of time, a sort of curse: the difficult relation of Hemingway with the two hostile Countries of Cuba and America continues on, and related to the claims  for the rights over his house and on the funds for the restoration of his assets. Fortunately though, together with these sad political events, remains also unchangeable the memory that Cubans have toward a celebrated and respected personality, up to becoming almost the symbol of that old tie between the island and all the American “gringos” who have loved it. Among the tourists are in many to remember the Cuban Gregorio Fuentes, the fisherman who inspired “The old man and the sea”, died recently at 104 years of age, who was  authorized  by the government to eat free every day at Terraza, almost as guarding the mythical brotherly friend.
From Cuba Hemingway left several times, even to Italy, staying twice in Venice. He liked to roam the noble and little snob city, moving  between Harry’s Bar, Gritti Palace Hotel and Cortina, the most fashionable bars, where to spend time in company of friends, a glass of Amarone or Veronese wine and a notebook on which to put down his fantasy.    In autumn 1948 he was at the Locanda Cipriani of Torcello, where the same Arrigo remembers that “the writer was still strong and exuberant and every once in a while used to jokingly release his passion for boxing… the match without winners or losers ended always with an inevitable drinking. Hemingway, who seemed to live freely his day, was of an unfailing precision in his work: Often in the morning he used to go duck hunting.”
Back in Italy, from 1952 to 1954, his passion for hunting drove him to meet aristocratic families and the Venetian Lagoon, from Caorle to Bibione, especially the fishing valleys, which became the frame for the novel “Across the river and into the trees”, one of the last documents dedicated by the world’s literature to the celebration of the city of Venice.
It was exactly in those occasions that he befriended baron Raimondo Nanuk Franchetti, owner of the Valle Grande, and he met also the daughter of the Baron Ivancich, with whom he fell in love. The love relation between the American colonel and Renata, the novel’s heroine, it’s exactly the story of the relation between the writer and Renata Ivancich, consumed amid the shores of the Piave, island of Burano, bell tower of Torcello and the winter landscapes described with masterful strokes of brushes. Because of the open references to places and people actually met at the time, and due to the scandal that the love affair unleashed in Italy, the author forbade the publishing of the novel for at least two years.
Hemingway put an end to his life just as he lived it: between reality and legend. The invisible hero with mad feelings overcame the strict writer. He killed himself on Sunday morning July 2 1961 after having sung with his wife a popular song that he had learned in Cortina and usually sang in those moments of serenity. Serenity…no… Ernest Hemingway never reached that.