Gregorio Fuentes, the old man of Hemingway's Old Man and The Sea, died this week. Patsy McGarry met him in Havana and savoured echoes of Hemingway's life in Cuba.
He was very old, but Ernest Hemingway once said of him, "everything will be old but never the shine in Gregorio's eyes". And it was true. Gregorio Fuentes was 100 when we met at his home near Havana in January 1998.
He lived in the tiny fishing village of Cojimar, east of the city. It was there Hemingway kept his fishing boat, Pilar, and Gregorio was its captain for over 20 years. In Cojimar they believe Gregorio was the inspiration for the elderly fisherman Santiago in Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning novel The Old Man and the Sea.
"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."
Arguably nobody spent more time with Hemingway than Gregorio. They would put to sea for days, just the two of them, fish for marlin, drink whiskey, talk, think, and occasionally Hemingway might write. On one such expedition in 1952 he asked Gregorio what he should call the new novel he was writing.
"When Pilar Used Sail by the Sea," suggested Gregorio.
"Say no more," responded Hemingway, suddenly inspired, "we'll call it The Old Man and the Sea."
Hemingway grew up as a writer during his years with him, Gregorio believed. He knew all the stories, he said, all of which he believed had an autobiographical character. Islands in the Stream in particular was about Pilar, he said.
Gregorio and Hemingway first met during a storm at sea in the Gulf of Mexico in 1928. It was near Tortoise Island and Hemingway's boat had been badly damaged. Gregorio did all he could to help. He gave Hemingway provisions and waited with him until the US coast guard arrived to take the writer back to Key West in Florida.
He recalled that Hemingway spoke good Spanish and that they got on very well. Hemingway, who was just another guy as far as Gregorio was concerned, promised to contact him when he visited Havana again. And he did.
In fact Ernest Hemingway's first visit to Cuba was also in 1928. He was on the steamer Orita, which was sailing from La Rochelle in France to Key West in Florida. It docked for a few hours at Havana in the early morning of April 2nd that year.
He went for a walk around the city and was seduced by it. He returned many times over the following years, before moving to live there in 1939.
During the 1930s he used stay at the recently restored and very beautiful Ambos Mundos hotel in Old Havana. There he would write and go for long walks through the city streets in the evening, calling regularly to La Bodeguita del Medio and the Floridita. Graffito in La Bodeguita, written by him, reads: "My mojito in La Bodeguita. My daiquiri in El Floridita."
The mojito and daiquiri are potent cocktails. Towards the end of the 1930s he discovered Cojimar, its tiny harbour and its La Terraza restaurant. He also renewed his acquaintance with Gregorio, who lived close to La Terraza. They began to fish together for marlin. "Big, big ones," Gregorio recalled.
Hemingway had a boat built and he called it Pilar. He asked Gregorio to be its captain. He agreed and was later described as the pillar of Pilar. "La Mar" was how Hemingway addressed the sea.
"The old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought."
After their long fishing expeditions they would return to La Terraza and drink there with the local fishermen. "They sat on the Terrace and many of the fishermen made fun of the old man and he was not angry."
People from all over the world used to come to Cojimar to fish for marlin in those days, Gregorio remembered. They came from Spain, Italy, Russia, Africa. But that has all stopped now.
Gregorio was 55 when The Old Man and the Sea was written. The description of Santiago in the novel fitted him perfectly. Photographs suggest he always looked old. The man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks.
The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands and the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords but none of these scars was fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
He recalled Hemingway saying, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, "We will have very much money now."
Hemingway dedicated the prize to the fishermen of Cojimar and went to the shrine of El Cobre at Santiago de Cuba, in the south-east of the island, where he left his Nobel medal at the feet of La Virgen de la Caridad Del Cobre, Cuba's patron saint.
Hemingway, Gregorio's grandson Rafael said, helped many people in Cojimar. Thanks to him also, they believe, the film of the novel, with Spencer Tracy as Santiago, was made at Cojimar in 1956. In gratitude for all his help, the fishermen collected propellers from their boats, melted them down and erected a bronze bust to Hemingway which still stands overlooking the little harbour.
An inscription on the plinth gives the writer's date of birth however as 1898. He was born in 1899.
A 6 km stretch of sea off Havana has been named Hemingway's Mile. He gave it that name himself some time during the many hours of the many years he spend undulating on its waves, fishing. In 1950 he donated a cup as first prize in a fishing competition which is still held in May every year off Marina Hemingway in Havana.
In 1960 the prize was won by Fidel Castor, who had come to power in 1959. There is a photograph in La Terraza of Hemingway presenting Castro with the cup. By then Hemingway had been living in Havana for 20 years. In 1939 he bought Finca Vigia, an estate between the city and Cojimar. He lived there with his third wife Mary until he returned to the US in 1960. They say he used rise at dawn in that house each day and write for six hours while standing in oversized moccasins before a typewriter.
The house is now know as Museo Hemingway and is as he left it in 1960. Visitors can look in but they cannot enter. Groups of middle-aged women guard it strictly.
It is beautiful, airy and bright, as befits Cuba's warm, wonderful climate. Magazines with jaded covers rest on the sitting-room tables with bottles of Cinzano and Bacardi in a wine rack beside it, their labels browned by age.
The trophy room is a homage to mach-ismo, with bullets and bullet casings neatly ordered on a table and along its walls the heads of great animals killed on safari.
". . . The old man had seen many great fish. He had seen many that weighed more than a thousand pounds and he had caught two of that size in his life, but never alone.
Now alone and out of sight of land, he was fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever heard of."
The writing room has a large mahogany table and shelves and shelves of books, too far inside the window to be identified. On the wall is a drawing of a bull etched in stone and presented to Hemingway by Picasso. Pilar is preserved in the garden of the house, as are the graves of four of his dogs.
He left Pilar to Gregorio when he returned to the US in 1960. Gregorio said he knew Hemingway had leukaemia and that he went to the US for treatment, intending to return. He never said goodbye, Gregorio recalled. Gregorio didn't talk about Hemingway's death. It still upset him.
In Cojimar they remember how tired Hemingway used to be in those last weeks with them and they believe he decided to take his own life because he did not want to endure a long, meaningless, debilitating, terminal disease.
". . . He knew he was beaten now - finally and without remedy
. . . He sailed lightly now and he had no thoughts nor any feelings of any kind. He was past everything now . . ."
In Gregorio's modest home on a slope there was a large picture of himself, Hemingway and Pilar. It was a reproduction of a 1990 painting by C. Salowski.
Gregorio liked to sit beneath this picture in his front room wearing a baseball cap with Capitan written on it. It is how he received visitors who liked to talk to him about Hemingway.
He lived with one of his four daughters. He had seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
As part of his 99th birthday celebrations in 1996, his family brought him to see his birthplace on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, off the north-west coast of Africa. But generally he lived quietly, remembering the past. Life's tempests had passed by.
". . . The old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about lions."
Quoted extracts are from The Old Man and the Sea