Editor Hemingway once commented on Cuba: "I love this country and feel at home. A place that makes people feel at home, except the hometown where they were born, is the place where fate belongs. "

From 65438 to 0939, Hemingway lived in Havana, Cuba for 22 years, which was also the most remarkable period of his literary achievements. The famous The Old Man and the Sea was born there, and its main characters are also based on Hemingway's Cuban friends. 1962, Hemingway died, and the observation villa where he lived before his death was also transformed into Hemingway Museum, attracting a large number of fans to punch in every year.

Authorized by the publishing house, this paper extracts some paragraphs from the chapter of Hemingway, tells the author's experience of visiting Hemingway's former residence in Cuba, and reproduces the life track of a generation of literary masters in Cuba.

Looking back now, many of my ideas when I first went to Cuba changed more or less with the deepening of my understanding, except one thing: if I could only visit one scenic spot on the island, I would choose the former residence of the American writer Hemingway.

It may seem blasphemous to the local people, but I don't think so. On the contrary, it is actually a compliment. Because only truly beautiful countries and cities will people naturally sprout this kind of goodwill contest. Just as we usually look for the most elegant one among the five aesthetic feelings, we will not embarrass another person with the same problem.

It takes about half an hour to drive from downtown Havana to Wangshan Villa, but it depends on the identity of the driver. If he is a local who dabbles in tourism, he will go south along the central expressway of Cuba, and Hemingway's former residence is in the southeast suburb of the city. Foreigners who live in Havana for a long time will not get lost. This is the address that ancient relatives and friends must visit. What worries me most is the amateur brother who wants to earn some extra money. On one occasion, I went to the lookout villa several times by myself and stopped a private car at the gas station on the corner. That's an old chevrolet with a rusty red driver. Although the spacious leather seats are old, there are no scratches and sweat stains left by daily passengers.

We are all selfish, the negotiated fare is half cheaper than usual, and he can also save some foreign exchange certificates at leisure. After all, in Cuba, the cheapest thing is time, and he may not be the master.

However, half an hour later, the scenery outside the window made me confused. We sailed into a small fishing village. The wind was salty and fishy, and the wheels slowly ran over the sand road mixed with shell fragments. I put my arm on the back of the chair in the front row and leaned forward, as if the driver's vision was more accurate than that in the back seat.

"Not this place, the house is not by the sea." I said.

Indeed, you can't see the sea from the windows of the hall and bedroom. Unless you climb a white square tower in the manor and look out from the top room, you can catch a glimpse of the sea with white spots in the fireworks outline of palm trees. In that small room, there is a vertical telescope and a wooden chair with a blue cushion. Hemingway will write there.

In fact, the driver didn't know the address, only knowing that the owner of the house was a great writer who wrote The Old Man and the Sea, he drove directly to the fishing port.

We asked the villagers who passed along the road for directions, but fewer Cubans knew Hemingway than I expected. When the sign marked "Lookout Mountain Villa" finally appeared in the field of vision, another half hour passed. I felt a little guilty, so I gave more gas money. Together, it is almost the same as the price of ordinary taxis.

Hemingway's former residence-lookout villa

I read Hemingway's novels, but it has been difficult to produce * * * sounds. On the contrary, I am fascinated by his pilgrimage life. At the age of 20, I studied Spanish in Madrid during my summer vacation. As soon as the course was over, I went to Paris by train. Hemingway and his first wife once rented an apartment just a few blocks away from my youth hotel, and a commemorative sign hung on the outer wall of the building.

"This is Paris when we were young, so poor, but so happy." Every visitor who comes here will recite this sentence engraved on the sign.

It comes from The Flowing Feast, an essay about Paris, which was actually written by Hemingway in Cuba. There are so many nonfiction works about Paris, and the most famous one is that the author didn't start writing until nearly 40 years after he left here, which is unimaginable for the publishing industry that pays attention to timeliness, but it also gives me a lot of comfort for an author with writing procrastination.

I often wonder if recalling the past in an environment with completely different climatic conditions will make my memory biased. The Flowing Feast is a case worthy of scrutiny. In my vague impression, Hemingway's Paris seems too cold. In addition to satisfying the writer's alcohol addiction, the wine fair between paragraphs should also have the function of driving away cold and warming up. But when I came to Wangshan Mountain Villa, I understood at once.

The author looks at the pictures of Beijing United Publishing Company from the window.

Here, everything is contrary to Paris. The Caribbean is similar to the tropical rain forest climate, and the unrestrained luxuriance of broad-leaved green plants is unmatched by any temperate place in summer. There is also the house itself, which is divided into eight spaces with different areas: there is a huge matador oil painting hanging in the living room, which is the cover of the first edition of Death in the Afternoon, and the cloth sofa printed with flowers is the only feminine decoration in the house; An ochre square brick corridor leads to the backyard and is used as a restaurant; There are two rooms in the study, and the more famous writers tend to choose the smaller desk. When Hemingway's figure became wider and wider, he simply moved the typewriter to a half-height bookshelf in the bedroom and wrote under a deer head specimen.

I have been to Wangshan Mountain Villa for at least five times, but I still don't remember the existence of the door. This may be because there is no sense of boundary between space and space, and both inside and outside are transparent. The line of sight can pass through the glass window in the corner of the house, pass the English novels and old magazines on the bookshelf, and pass the wine bottles on the side table. The stock of wine still exists on the day when the owner leaves, just like a clock stopped on the ruins of the earthquake and finally passed through the window on the other side. If you look around indoors, the huge wooden windows give the house an open-air courtyard atmosphere, as if to satisfy the peeping desire of outsiders. This kind of transparency is completely different from the obscure and dark European apartment.

Hemingway's desk and bookshelf. Beijing United Publishing Company Chart

However, the richness of lookout villa has little to do with architecture. As long as you look carefully, you will find that the house is as simple as origami. It's all right angles, and the only curve appears on the arches of the dining room and bedroom. Although it adds a sense of sacredness to religious sites, it is not a stroke of genius in the architecture of the same period. What really turned the stone into gold was Hemingway's addition, whether it was the animal head specimens he got from hunting in Africa or the paintings and souvenirs he owned. The lookout villa is like a vacuum time capsule, a sleeping animal, and you can feel its shallow breath. It seems that because of this, no matter how noisy tourists come here, they dare not make a sound, for fear of being awakened and running away.

On the white wall behind bathroom door, a string of fine print is written in black pencil, like marching ant colony and crooked morning exercise team. Ordinary visitors are not allowed to enter, and it is difficult for ordinary people to find the secret of this corner of the bathroom. Even if I noticed it, I couldn't see the contents of the words clearly. If I guess out of thin air, I will probably think it is the number of words in each manuscript. However, before I came, I saw a close-up of this wall in an album: "Ant" is actually Hemingway's weight. More precisely, it includes the specific date and the weight of the day. The scale in the corner. I found that Hemingway would record his weight before the arrival of summer, which was also the peak of his weight, exceeding 240 kg several times. When he successfully lost weight to about 200 kg, he began to record it every day like an addiction, even until summer. At this time, it was only one year since Hemingway swallowed a gun and committed suicide. Too strong a desire for control may be a precursor to collapse.

Animal head specimens on the wall. Beijing United Publishing Company Chart

Seeing the villa always gives me a sense of contradiction. Judging from Hemingway's feelings as a book lover, he wants to live here for a long time, as evidenced by more than 9,000 books. In fact, Hemingway lived in this house for 22 years, which is the only property he bought outside the United States. At the same time, the lookout villa exudes an atmosphere that will be abandoned at any time. It's like a Summer Palace. Even though for whom the bell tolls and The Old Man and the Sea were both born here, in essence, it is not much different from the place where Hemingway wrote at his desk while traveling.

Maybe the lookout villa is a writer's suitcase. Borrowing Naipaul's metaphor, Hemingway described the lookout villa in the forties and fifties as a person who desperately wanted to go out.

Hemingway did treat it this way. 1960 In July, he wrote down the weight of No.24 on the bathroom wall and left Cuba the next day and never came back.

The house was built on a hillside. Walk along the forest path and you will pass a swimming pool at the bottom of the sky blue pool. I've never seen it full of water. There are several carved iron chairs painted white scattered by the pool, which are as heavy as anchors sinking into the water. Further on is the cat's graveyard. Four small fan-shaped tombstones, like cat's small ears. At the end of the manor is Hemingway's fishing boat. The bottom of the boat is bright red, reminiscent of the scarlet mouth of the shark in the novel. Black hull, the cabin is close to the brown of logs. The deck is painted green and looks like a soft carpet from a distance.

The whole ship was erected by a cement pier shaped like a tombstone. The ceiling and the walkway around the boat for half a week should be built after the viewing villa becomes Hemingway Museum, so that visitors can see every detail of the boat more clearly. For example, the ship name "pilar" printed on the stern is the nickname of Hemingway's second wife Pauline, and later Hemingway used this name in the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" describing the Spanish Civil War. "key west" is printed under the name of the ship. This southernmost city in the United States is not the origin of this ship. Hemingway bought this ship from Brooklyn, but he often sailed it in key west.

Hemingway vision china loved fishing at sea.

People who come here always unconsciously guess whether pilar is related to the old man and the sea, forgetting that the latter is only a novella. Even if it is based on a true story, the fictional component is always relatively large.

However, in an island country surrounded by the ocean, the image of a ship can often be interpreted more richly. It is an expedition, a transcendence and sometimes a symbol of revolution.

The Cuban revolution began with a ship. 1956, Castro, who was exiled in Mexico, sailed a yacht named Granma and 8 other guerrillas from Mexico to Cuba. Raul and Ernesto Guevara were also on board. This is another attempt after Castro failed to attack the Monkada barracks. The part of crossing the sea went smoothly than expected, because Batista's government got the wrong information and mistakenly thought that the top of the ship was blue, so the Granma with a green top was lucky enough to land. On the third day after landing, it was wiped out by government forces, and the only remaining 20 people hid in a sugarcane field, and later established a base area in Maestra Mountain.

The image of the ship helped me to connect Castro with Hemingway. For a long time, like most people, I mistakenly thought they were close friends. This illusion stems not only from the black and white photos that can be seen everywhere in Havana souvenir shops, but also from Castro's keen style in dealing with literary giants, from Nie Luda to Garcí a Má rquez.

The portrait of Hemingway on the wall of the former residence has a classic white beard. Vision china diagram

However, according to public records, the two met only once. The meeting took place in the Hemingway Cup fishing competition in May, 1960. Hemingway was the guest of honor, but Castro's appearance was controversial. One is that he won the championship in the fishing competition, and the other is that he unexpectedly appeared at the award ceremony.

I naturally prefer the former, because in Cuba, accidents do not exist. No matter before or after the revolution.

"I'm just a novice." Castro, with a black beard, took the trophy.

"You are a lucky novice." Hemingway with white beard replied. Life magazine recorded this conversation in the report. Even the greatest writers can't predict the randomly generated metaphors in daily conversations. As one of the most famous Americans in Cuban history, Hemingway was deeply concerned about the Cuban revolution.

The true attitude towards life has always been a hot topic for historians. Judging from the number of meetings with Castro, Hemingway of the English Department is obviously less enthusiastic than other Latin American writers. But in retrospect, this judgment is unfair. Young Hemingway recorded the Spanish Civil War on the front line. Compared with this, the fearlessness of other writers is more metaphysical. What's more, Hemingway was being dragged into the bottom of the sea by the worsening depression, and a drowning man accidentally felt a flowering tree on the shore.

At least, Hemingway is close and easy to accept. From the perspective of literary creation, Castro looks like a character who will appear in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Collecting a photo of Hemingway and Castro has been my wish for many years. In a shop that specializes in antique photos not far from Weapons Square, I carefully compare each version, even if the differences are subtle.

In the end, the winner was a bust of two people: Hemingway wearing sunglasses was talking in Castro's ear, and Castro bowed his head and said nothing. This is an independent moment when cause and effect are cut off. It's hard to see the truth from it, but the space of daydreaming attracts me.

Like all legends, later readers only keep what they like.

Proofreading: Zhang Yan