A Ticket to the Circus (45 page)

We went to the bars where Hemingway had drunk, El Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio, which had the best mojitos. We visited Hemingway’s house itself, the Finca, and were allowed to go inside and roam around, a treat that was not allowed to the general public. It was just as though Ernest had stepped out for a moment to take a dip in the pool: he had left his glasses beside a sheet of paper on a tall writing table in his bedroom, where he’d worked standing up. There was his scale and the chart where he recorded his weight every morning. We looked at his bookshelves, but didn’t see any of Norman’s books.

“When
The Deer Park
came out, I sent it to Hemingway, hoping for twenty good words to use for a blurb, which might have meant the difference in a half success or a breakthrough. But I was also angry at myself for begging, so I put a rude inscription in it.”

“Did he read it?” I asked.

“Ten days later it was returned in the same package, never opened. It was stamped ‘Address Unknown.’ But later I got a letter from him. It seems he went out and bought a copy, and said he liked it and it didn’t deserve the shitty reviews.”

Norman and Hemingway never met. George Plimpton almost arranged a meeting in New York shortly after
Advertisements for Myself
was published, but after Norman waited around all day by the telephone, with George calling every hour or so with bulletins, Hemingway never saw him. It was a little sad, seeing Norman poking about in Hemingway’s house, wondering what they might have said to each other if they had indeed ever met. Kind of like the phantom affair he might have had with Marilyn Monroe, if they had ever met, which they didn’t.

Norman in the Hemingway house.

   
PABLO ARMANDO TOOK
Tom, Len, Norman, and me to the country outside Havana, where we joined a throng of three thousand people who were making a pilgrimage to a small church in El Rincon. It was the festival of Saint Lazarus, who was also known as Babalu Aye, the saint of healing in the Santeria religion. The night was dark, but every pilgrim carried a candle, bought from vendors who lined the road also selling statues of saints, plates of fried rice and plantains, or spaghetti. The smell of good cigar smoke wafted through the air. I’d worn the wrong shoes, a pair of woven leather flats that got wet and stretched so much that they flopped up and down on my heels, causing blisters. I fervently wished for a Band-Aid, but my discomfort was nothing
compared to the pain of the penitents, who were crawling the three miles alongside us, some with cinder blocks wired to their ankles, to honor Saint Lazarus, so I didn’t complain.

Castro had only a year or two earlier built a camp for people with AIDS. They were shipped there as soon as they were diagnosed, in hopes of containing the spread of the disease. We passed by it, a tall fence with dozens of people pressed against the wire, holding candles, shouting out to us. We stopped and touched their outstretched hands, hoping to at least give them a little human contact, as we could offer nothing else. It was so poignant, looking through the fence at the big eyes of people who didn’t know what was going to befall them. All of us were crying. But we had to leave them, and on we went, marching toward El Rincon, my shoes flapping, the penitents doggedly crawling beside us.

When we finally got there, I was dismayed to see what a tiny church it was. Double doors stood open and a steady stream of people climbed the steps, inched into the front and out the back. In the middle of the church, priests were up on a platform, flinging holy water out over the crowd. There was no way I was going to go into that swarm of people. I am claustrophobic and don’t do well with crowds. But Norman, Len, and Tom wanted to go, so I said I would wait right outside and they should come and find me when they came out. They plunged into the maelstrom, as if diving into a boiling stream, and as they started to climb the concrete steps leading to the doors, Tom suddenly was squirted, it seemed, out of the crowd and fell onto the grass beside the steps. I ran over to him and he was okay, but not up to trying it again. “I saw Norman go in,” he said, rubbing his head, “and I don’t think his feet were even touching the ground. The crowd was just carrying him along.”

I began to really worry. Norman wasn’t tall. If he fell, he might not be noticed until the crowd had tromped him underfoot. We watched the back door, and there was no Norman coming out. Len joined us, but hadn’t seen him, either. We waited and waited. He was nowhere. I pictured the headlines, “Novelist Stomped to Death in Voodoo Ritual!” Then, just as I was deciding to panic, here he came. “I had to crawl out the window,” he said. “I couldn’t get to the door.” He was exhilarated. It had been a fine adventure.

We packed a lot into that trip. We spent an afternoon with Gabriel García Márquez and his wife at their house; Norman went to the Bay of Pigs and checked it out for the book he was writing,
Harlot’s Ghost
, and we went to a club and heard Arturo Sandoval, one of the most famous trumpet players in Cuba, who did a Miles Davis and played with his back to the crowd.

The night after our Saint Lazarus experience, we were invited to a reception for the film festival, where Fidel Castro would be present. Norman had always admired him because of his daring to take over a country with just a few ragged troops, and his success in keeping it. Norman always had the fantasy that if he could just talk to Fidel, he could convince him of the error of his ways with Communism, and history would be changed. Now he had the chance. I was impressed with Castro in spite of myself. He was bigger than I’d realized, handsome in his dress uniform, and blessed with the same magnetism that world leaders all seemed to possess. It appears that kind of charisma is a prerequisite to become a world leader. Without it, you might just as well study to become a CPA or whatever.

We were introduced to Fidel, and then we were led over to four chairs at the side of the room. Fidel sat in one, I was seated across from him, Norman was to his right, and the translator was across from Norman. It was a little odd, as there was no table, just the four of us facing one another, but the conversation began, with Fidel speaking in Spanish, looking directly at me, while the translator looked at Norman and translated. Norman spoke to Fidel, who answered him by looking at me, and I sat there not saying a word. It was enough to be able to keep my seat, with that powerful rhetoric I couldn’t understand and those dark eyes looking directly into mine. Fidel brought up the Saint Lazarus ceremony as an example of the religious freedom they had in Cuba, and he was surprised when we told him we had been there.

Norman was trying to convince him to come to America and speak directly to the American people, hoping that relations between our countries would turn around if they could meet him, hear him directly, and know who he really was instead of what the American government wanted them to know. Fidel said he would be happy to come, but no one had invited him, and therefore who was going to pay for the security? That was a problem Norman hadn’t thought about. Of course it
would cost millions in security alone, not to mention, where would he stay? Who would be responsible for arranging his schedule? I can imagine the look on the secretary’s face when someone from Fidel’s office called the White House and said, “Norman Mailer has invited President Castro to come to America and talk to the people, so he will be arriving next Thursday.…” No. I don’t think that would be practical. Still, they had a great, animated discussion, with Fidel doing a lot of the talking. He did speak a small amount of English, and he told me later that the next time we came, he would invite us to his house and cook for us. Of course we never made it back.

Me, Norman, Fidel Castro, and translator.

The showing of the film at the festival was almost anticlimactic, but it was nice for Norman to once again be the center of attention with his movie. I wish it had been more successful. I wish I had truly liked it, but making that movie was probably one of the best times of Norman’s life, and I can’t begrudge him that. Even if I was not a real part of it.

When we left, I cleaned out my suitcase of all my hats, scarves, deodorants, lotions, makeup, and toiletries and gave them to the girls who cleaned our house and took care of us. They were so thrilled, even at the half-squeezed-out tube of toothpaste. They never got a chance to
buy those things. If I had known the situation, I would have brought over a lot more. It made me so angry to think of how the United States government was starving that poor little island, and forbidding anyone else in the world to do business with them, either, while they were trading like bandits with China and every other Communist country in the world. Somehow, it had to change. The people were courageous, but they were paying a high price for politics that went back fifty years, someone else’s politics, started before most of them were even born.

W
e traveled a lot in the late eighties, going to Europe and the Soviet Union several times. The trips were some of the best times for us. We loved walking, poking into little courtyards, and having coffee in small cafés. I didn’t speak a foreign language—my horizons in Atkins were somewhat limited—but Norman spoke passable French, and later, when he started working on the book about Lee Harvey Oswald, he went to Berlitz to learn Russian. It was not a huge success. One time, when he returned from a trip, I accidentally washed his passport in his shirt pocket. We put paper towels between the pages to try to dry it out, but it looked like a weird, fluffy blue biscuit. The next time he went back to Russia, the boy at immigration glanced at it and told him it was no good.
“Nyet,”
he said, shoving it back across the desk. Norman tried to explain that the date was perfectly valid, that it had gone through the washer, but he didn’t have the words in Russian for “washing machine,” so he attempted to tell the officer he’d fallen into a river. I think what he said was that he jumped into a fish, or maybe the passport was a fish, and the boy was so confused he just shook his head and stamped it.

I loved Russia. Maybe it was because Norman had never taken any of his other wives there and each new experience in Russia was our own. In other places, like the south of France, or Paris, I would be aglow with delight about how wonderful everything was, and Norman would say, “Ah, that’s nothing. You should have been here in 1948 when I was here with Bea. It was really great then.” Or, “It was so much better back in 1956 when I was here with Adele. It’s really gone downhill.” Finally, at Oxford, I got heartily sick of it. We were looking at the beautiful old buildings, and out behind one was a lovely pasture with brown-and-white cows grazing.

I said, “Oh, how beautiful, just like a John Constable.”

He said, “Hm. I do believe this is the same cow pasture I was at with Beverly in 1965, but it was much more beautiful then. The cows were better.”

I turned on him. “Do you know
why
it was always better in the old days?” I snarled. “It was because you were
young
!” That shut him up. And it had the added advantage of being true.

But Russia was all my own. I went there the first time in 1984, and then in 1989, Gorbachev invited us to a conference on glasnost. There were several other famous Americans there, such as Gregory Peck and Gore Vidal. We hadn’t seen Gore since the night of the PEN reading, when he and Norman had been courteous but stiff, and I was a little nervous about what would happen, but as compatriots often are in a foreign country, we were all quite friendly. Gore and I had always liked each other, and enough time had passed that he and Norman were ready to make an uneasy peace. I don’t think either of them ever mentioned the feud again, for which I was grateful.