His name, of course, was Ernest Hemingway.
Even though thousands of books and essays and dissertations have been written on Hemingway’s life and literature they mostly stress the influence that his early journalism training had on him, and how it in turn created his breathtaking impact on American fiction. These are the “facts” that everyone knows. My thesis is very different:
Though Hemingway claimed to despise journalism, he never stopped being a journalist. He wrote hundreds of thousands of words on current events for magazines that paid him very well, scribbling his observations on every conceivable topic from barbershops to boxing, from bullfights to bullshit, from picadors to pecadillos—while decade after decade, he produced less and less fiction, and even then, only under “literary duress.” In the end, if you weighed his fiction against nonfiction, on word count alone, fiction was less than that one-eighth of his total output: the “tip of the iceberg” syndrome.
There was one place that my subject—over a period of thirty years, almost half his life span—had visited, frequented, and finally lived in. Yet he never wrote much about it until late in his life. And even then, it wasn’t reportage, it was just a sketch, a short story, a simple vignette that he crashed out in a matter of weeks, and which he somehow with effort managed to stretch into a brief novel.
It sold five million copies in magazine form, and another million in books. It was made into a movie, it landed him a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize. It’s still found in libraries all over the world and taught in schools. It made him rich. Maybe it also made him dangerous. It was—oddly, for a man who hated symbolism—the only allegory he ever wrote: The Old Man and the Sea.
If that simple allegory was the tip of the iceberg, then what exactly was the vast, deep mass of “subaquatic facts” lurking beneath the surface?
It was the place where he’d set the allegory, the place that was almost a character in the story—the place where Hemingway lived from World War II to the very height of the Cold War—the place he loved so much that he refused to leave it, even when he knew he had to, even when his property was about to be seized by the local State, even when he had been warned repeatedly to leave by the U.S. State Department, even when he was being haunted by the FBI, had been threatened by the CIA.
Cuba.
Less than a year after his return to the U.S.—to his house here across this very river, near Ketchum, Idaho—the world’s most famous living writer, Ernest Hemingway, was dead.
That was precisely the burr I’d been struggling to dislodge all night. But now I thought I knew: all the signs had been there all along, hadn’t they? All the numbers now added up. I knew that if I’d figured it out, then whoever was watching me (and I was sure by now that it was not just my imagination) was not likely to hit the “pause” button any time soon. And it really terrified me.
I checked the clock: it was four o’clock in the morning. Yanking some tiny digital memory cards out of a plastic bag I always carried in my jeans pocket, I frantically jammed these, one after another, into my laptop and started downloading my data with links. I left a little jingle as my own calling-card on each. If I couldn’t reach Leo, maybe he could reach me. I would hide these each in ways that he’d be sure to find them. Then I would hit the road just before dawn, and cover my tracks—as he’d taught me, so long ago, to do.
For I’d suddenly guessed why Ernest Hemingway took so long to leave Cuba—even after the revolution was over, after the Castro takeover—why he’d never written about it, why he’d felt he had to encrypt what he knew in an allegory, why right afterward, he’d been in two plane crashes in a row that looked like accidents, why he was so depressed by the huge success of his book—the awards, the money, the spotlight of fame—that he couldn’t go to the Nobel ceremony, could barely bring himself to write his brief acceptance speech.
Less than six months after Hemingway moved back to America, he was secretly flown out of Idaho and slapped, by surprise, into the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he was submitted to electroconvulsive shock therapy: month after excruciating month, over and over, they’d fried his brains. Whatever it was that Hemingway discovered at the height of the Cold War, was something deadly dangerous that had to be erased from his mind—a process that quickly and surely drove him to suicide. The cold, frightening thought even entered my own mind, that he may have been murdered.
This was why I had to reach Leo at once: whatever it was I’d stumbled onto involving Cuba—whatever I was being watched for, paranoia or not—was something that seemed about to raise its ugly head again. Right now.
Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.
When Paloma vanished, I was the one who was in trouble with everybody.
Our parents were livid—the only thing they’d agreed on in years was that it was my fault Palo was missing. After all, I’d encouraged her in this crazy idea about Investigative Journalism. Didn’t I know that those kinds of journalists got themselves killed? (Actually, though our dad taught History of Journalism, it involved nothing more recent nor dangerous than Carlyle’s reports on the French Revolution. While mom couldn’t figure out how her gorgeous daughter, at age twenty-three, was still in school and unmarried.)
Not to mention that The Company, my employer, was equally miffed with me. My sister had apparently stumbled in the back door of an “eyes-only” website, sending up incipient-terrorist flags. They thought I’d given her the link (I hadn’t) and they put me on temporary leave, saying I was mucking about in the wrong backyard: Who do you think you are, Leo?—you’re an analyst, not a field operative. (Well actually, I am a field operative—been one for ages—my employer just doesn’t know it!) This break in my routine, however, afforded me the opportunity to do some investigations of my own.
In this entire scenario, my beautiful and brilliant sister, Paloma, seemed to be the only one with a grain of sense in her head. At least, she had the sense to get out of town before the yapping dogs got on her trail. (Well actually, they don’t use yapping dogs in the Rocky Mountains, that’s the Deep South, I believe.)
And she had the presence of mind, just before decamping, to send me that frozen trout: the one with the teeny digital card embedded inside its head. As soon as I got it, I knew she was gone, and why. Despite her fears she’d expressed on that disk, I felt sure my sister was okay. I did not yet know what had spooked her so much that she’d taken the drastic measure of using a dead cutthroat trout as bubble wrap for her communiqué. But since I was now on leave, I didn’t feel it necessary to share that communiqué, at least not yet, with my employer.
I waited with bated (or was it baited?) breath to learn more.
Meanwhile, I dropped by New Mexico State University in Santa Fe to pay a visit to Professor Livia Madachy—“PM” as Palo called her—Palo’s advisor, the one who’d first encouraged her to branch out and study something other than (what everyone else had voted for, due to Palo’s good looks) being a weather girl or a TV anchor.