View of the World (31 page)

Fleming had said, ‘go into the country,’ and I did so, travelling by bus from one end of the land to the other. The first discovery was that the mental attitudes of the countrymen were radically different from those of Cubans who worked for their living in the towns. The industrial worker had been converted to a kind of conservatism through his expectation of fairly steady employment the year round. The countryman enjoyed no such security. One fourth of Cuba grew nothing but sugar; and the single fact overshadowing the life of the Cuban peasant was that the sugar harvest occupied five months, to be followed by seven months of unemployment. He was ready therefore for a revolution of any kind that would help to fill his stomach in the seven lean months, and relieve him from such feudal bullies at Masferrer and his thugs.

Santiago, capital of the sugar country, was of necessity, where the action was, and I went there to talk to cane-cutters and sugar magnates,
and also on a strong recommendation from Havana to make contact with a famous clairvoyant, Tia Margarita, said to be consulted on occasion by Batista himself, and to know as much about what was going on as anyone in eastern Cuba. The astonishing statistic had been offered that one person in three in Cuba, regardless of colour, was a secret adherent of one of the cults introduced by the Negro slaves; and Tia Margarita happened to be high-priestess of Chango, Yoruba god of war, most powerful of the deities of the African jungles.

She proved to be a comfortable-looking middle-aged black lady of compelling humour and charm, living in a small suburban house with a garden full of sweetpeas, attached to the usual straw-thatched voodoo temple. Women of her kind were to be found in every town in Cuba, combining in their operations all the exciting mumbo-jumbo of horoscopy and divination with the real social service performed in solving personal problems of all kinds, and in treating the sick from their wide repertoire of herbal remedies.

Tia Margarita ushered me into a chamber cluttered with the
accessories
of her profession, the skulls of small animals, the withered bats and the dusty salamanders, gently kicking aside the live piglets and cockerels that would provide the material for future sacrifices. A faint culinary odour suggested the preparation of her celebrated remedy for nervous tension – a thick soup made from the bones of dogs. I added my contribution – a pair of dark spectacles – to the homely offerings, including roller skates, tubes of toothpaste, and a jar of Pond’s Cold Cream, stacked under the war-god’s altar. I noted the framed autographs, offered in gratitude by famous personalities: senators, baseball-players and motor racers who had come here with their troubles.

The mild maternal eyes scanned the print in the open book of my face, and her expression was one of slightly puzzled amusement. She expected to be called upon to demonstrate her speciality by forecasting the exact date of my death; instead of which I asked her what the people of Santiago thought about the war, and its likely outcome. If that was where my interest lay, she said, who better to discuss the matter with than Chango himself – surely the final authority on all such matters – who
spoke through her mouth at seances held at the temple every Saturday night? Unfortunately this was a Monday, and when I asked Tia Margarita for an opinion off the cuff as to the way things up in the Sierra were likely to go, she was oracular and obscure. ‘Chango says victory will be to whom victory is due,’ she said. Still, something came out of the interview, because Tia Margarita went into a kind of mini-trance, lasting perhaps ten seconds, then said that the war would be over in a year – which, give a few days, it was.

In the few days I had been in Santiago, warlike activity had
recommenced
. From the roof of the hotel in Cespedes Square, the night sparkled distantly where Castro partisans had gone into the cane-fields, to plant candles with their bases wrapped in paraffin-soaked rags. There was gun-play every night, usually when revolutionaries took on the police, but on one occasion when Castro’s 26th July Movement and the Communists decided on a shoot-out. By custom, the first shots were fired precisely at 10 p.m., giving the citizens the chance of a quiet stroll in the cool of the evening before the bullets began to fly. With a half-hour to go, and all the street lights ablaze, the promenaders began to stream out of the square and make for their homes, where they clustered at their doors like gophers ready to bolt for the shelter of their burrows when the shadow of an eagle fell upon them. Then, as the cathedral clock struck ten all the lights went out, and the streets were cleared for battle.

Back in Havana a call came through from Ian Fleming in London. We had made a loose arrangement for a meeting in Jamaica, but there was a change in dates. He asked how things were going, and I told him fairly well, adding that there was not a lot more to be done.

‘Have you talked to the Big Man?’ he wanted to know.

By this I understood that he meant not the President, but Hemingway. I told him that Hemingway had been ill, adding that Scott did not seem to feel that a meeting would be specially rewarding.

‘Never mind Scott,’ Fleming said. ‘Do your best to see him.’

I assured him that I would, and Fleming said that he had just read
The Old Man and the Sea
, again, and had found it even better on second
reading. He had the book open by the phone, and proceeded to read out a fairly long passage that he had found of special appeal.

A letter arrived from Hemingway next morning. It was neatly
handwritten
and formal in tone. He said he would be happy to see me at his farm, La Vigia, on the outskirts of the city, and would send his car to pick me up, suggesting the next afternoon for the visit.

Hemingway’s concern for his privacy was in strong evidence at his farm, the roof of the building being screened by a high fence, with a gate secured by a chain and an enormous padlock. The driver got out to unlock the padlock, drove the car through the gate, then stopped to go back and chain and lock the gate again. I was ushered into a large room, furnished in the main with bookshelves, where I found Hemingway, in his pyjamas, seated on his bed. He pulled himself to his feet to mumble a lacklustre welcome.

I was stunned by his appearance. At sixty years of age he looked like a man well into his seventies, and he was in wretched physical shape. He moved slowly under the great weight of his body to find the drinks, pouring himself, to my astonishment, a tumblerful of Dubonnet, half of which he immediately gulped down. Above all, it was his expression that shocked, for there was exhaustion and emptiness in his face. This was an encounter that might have been dangerous and undermining to any young man in the full enjoyment of ambition and hope, because it presented a parable on the subject of futility. Hemingway’s mournful eyes urged you to accept your lot as it was, and be thankful for it.

Some people, and Fleming and I were among them, regarded this man as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and at this time, three years after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, he had only just overtopped the pinnacle of his fame. He was a man who had gained all that life had to offer. He had crammed himself with every satisfaction, driven his body to the utmost, loved so many women, dominated so many men, hunted so many splendid animals. It was hard to believe that anything Hemingway had set out to do he had left unachieved. Yet after all his conquests he seemed ready to weep with Alexander, and, looking into his face, it was hard to believe that he would ever smile again.

We talked in a desultory and spiritless fashion, and it was Hemingway who brought up the subject of his publishers, showing little affection for them, but ready with criticism. He found them parsimonious, nervous of spending money on publicity, and this, he said, had had an adverse affect on the sales of his books in Great Britain, which were disappointing compared with those in the United States. He disliked the dust-jacket of the English edition of
The Old Man and the Sea
. A leading artist had been commissioned at great expense to produce the American version, which he showed me, and it had to be admitted that it was attractive enough to increase sales.

The release of this unexpected grain of information about his literary affairs led to my undoing. It seemed, mistakenly, to open a suitable opportunity – although Jonathan Cape had warned me that this was a topic to be approached with extreme caution – to mention that his publishers were eager to know whether anything new from him could be expected in the near future. The reaction was instant and hostile. A wasted and watery eye swivelled to watch me with anger and suspicion. What had I come for? What was it I wanted of him. In the coldest manner he asked, ‘Is this an interview?’ and I hastened to reassure him that it was not.

There was something in this scene with the faint remembered flavour of an episode in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, featuring Massart, ‘one of France’s great modern revolutionary figures’, now Chief Commissar of the International Brigade, a ‘symbol man’ who cannot be touched, and has come with time to believe only in the reality of betrayals. With infallible discernment Hemingway had described this great old man’s descent into pettiness; and now I was amazed that a writer who had understood how greatness could be pulled down by the wolves of weakness and old age, should – as it appeared to me – have been unable to prevent himself from falling into this trap.

Suddenly the talk was of Scott, and there was a note of harsh interrogation. Did I know him well, and had I heard about the challenge? I admitted that I had. I added quite sincerely that I regarded it as childish and absurd.

He seemed appeased, almost amicable. ‘Take a look at this,’ he said.
He put in front of me a copy of a letter he had sent to the
Havana Post
. In this, couched in the most conciliatory language, he had taken note of the challenge to a duel made by its Editor, Edward Scott. This he had decided not to take up, in the belief that he owed it to his readers not to jeopardise his life in this way.

I nodded approval. It was the best thing in the circumstances that he could have done. For all that I was surprised, and in some way
disappointed
at the wording of the letter, as I felt that his readers might have been left out of it.

The problem now was how Fleming’s demands – seeming more eccentric with every minute that passed – were to be satisfied. And yet Hemingway’s opinions on Cuba
ought
to have been worth listening to. He had gone there in search of ‘pay-dirt’ for his post-war fiction many years before, and remembering his passionate involvement in the Spanish Civil War and in the politics of those days, it was hard to believe that suddenly he had torn himself free from all involvement with his times and that Cuba for him was nothing but a tropical setting for the pursuit of visiting film actresses and gigantic fish. He downed another half-pint of Dubonnet, yawned, and I got up to go. He followed me to the waiting car. All his anger had passed and I imagine that he felt little but boredom. ‘A final word of advice,’ he said. ‘As soon as you get back to the hotel, I’d change that shirt.’

The shirt was a khaki affair, with convenient buttoning pockets of the kind it was hard to find in London at that time, and I had picked it up in an army-surplus shop in Oxford Street. ‘By their standards that’s a uniform,’ he said. ‘You could find yourself in a whole heap of trouble.’

I pointed out that I was wearing seersucker trousers with the shirt. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’s still a uniform the way they see it, and they make the laws. A lot of cops on this island with itchy trigger-fingers. They have a rebellion on their hands.’

There was nothing to be lost. I took the plunge. ‘How do you see all this ending?’ I said. Comrade Massart’s cautious, watery, doubting eyes were on me again. ‘My answer to that is I live here,’ Hemingway said. In my letter to Fleming I wrote, ‘Finally I saw the Great Man, as instructed. He told me nothing, but taught me a lot.’

T
OWARDS
the end of October 1962, Edmund and Vera Townley, a middle-aged British couple on holiday from Kenya, who were making their way back to England by easy stages, arrived in Sardinia. Edmund Townley was employed by an import-export firm in Nakuru as well as possessing a half interest in an apiary which was doing well. He was also a notable jack-of-all-trades, who had been farmer, miner, and road-engineer in turn, as well as a bit of an amateur detective. The Townleys were regarded as a quiet couple, who didn’t go out much, happy in their home life. They were a good-looking pair, and Vera had once been almost beautiful with strong, classic features. Edmund has been described by those close to him as being capable sometimes of aggressiveness and he was outstandingly devoid of physical fear.

While the life of the Kenya highlands suited them very well on the whole, they were both uneasy about the prospects for European settlers in independent Kenya. In Edmund Townley’s case, there was some special additional motive for nervousness. He had been actively involved in the Mau Mau emergency, both officially as a screening officer, and as a private individual organising his own information network which had been responsible for the capture and death of several terrorists. Now he had learned that his name was on the
ultranationalists
’ blacklist. This holiday, therefore, was to serve a double purpose. On the way home, the Townleys decided to visit the
Mediterranean
, and in particular Italy, with the idea perhaps eventually of buying land there for their retirement. Like so many Britons in their situation who have passed the active years of their lives under the African
sun, they found it hard to believe that they could reconcile themselves to the climate of their native land.

The Townleys had always enjoyed pioneering, and now they were on the look-out for a place where they could start from scratch once again, clear a piece of land and start a beekeeping project. They had nearly settled for the Canary Islands, but as Mrs Townley spoke fluent Italian, it seemed more sensible to settle in a place where this could be put to use. Sardinia seemed the next best choice, and here, at least, there would be no language problem while, from their first enquiries, all the other natural advantages they hoped to find in their new homeland seemed to be present.

Sardinia, indeed, had a great deal to offer. In spite of the Aga Khan’s luxurious settlement near Olbia in the north, the country was largely undiscovered by tourists, and land prices had not begun to soar as they had elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Nor so far had the coastline been disfigured by chaotic development projects, as for example had the Costa del Sol in Spain. The cost of living was substantially less than on the Italian mainland, the beaches were the finest in the Mediterranean, domestic help was cheap and plentiful, the people charming and hospitable, and the towns clean – some of them built round a core of noble architecture. This was a land, in fact, possessing all the warmth and geniality of Italy, minus slums, smells and noise. If anything more was asked of it, it was an archaeologist’s paradise, littered with dolmens, prehistoric ‘giants’ tombs’,
nuraghi
(only one out of 7,000 scientifically excavated), Punic cemeteries, shrines to the gods of Carthage and Rome, and rocks bearing mysterious inscriptions.

The Townleys planned to spend two weeks touring Sardinia, and, having flown from Rome to Sassari, they hired a Fiat car and set out for the interior. Ten days later, they arrived in Nuoro which is roughly in the centre of the island. Here they were in the foothills of the Barbagia – some of the wildest and least-known mountains in Europe. Sardinia is an island, but it is also a country in its own right, and it is big enough – one hundred and seventy miles in length from north to south – to possess real rivers and impressive mountain scenery. The sense of confinement, and
in the end the claustrophobia of the small island, does not exist in Sardinia. Looking southwards from the window of their hotel room the Townleys might have imagined themselves confronted once again by a vast African horizon, although not so much the Africa of their own green highlands of Kenya as the Africa to the far north of their home on the barren frontiers of Ethiopia.

Nuoro has many attractions for the discerning tourist. It has stood apart from this century, a leisurely introspective town built in a graceful but haphazard fashion on the lower slopes of the sugar-loaf mountain of Ortobene. It is supremely Sardinian, and women in from the country still walk its streets in the bold flamboyant folk-costumes inherited from the Middle Ages. Official brochures claim the view from the top of Ortobene to be the most striking in Europe. In fact, one looks out across a wide valley at an awe-inspiring recession of granite plateaux and peaks: a glittering hallucinatory whiteness where the sun striking the hard
rock-surfaces
counterfeits glaciers and snowfields. These are the mountains of the Barbagia – the word is from the same root as ‘barbarian’. They are only 5,000 feet high, but almost as remote to humanity as the Himalayan peaks, and they are the last refuge of some of Europe’s rarest animals, including a species of pygmy wild boar, as well as the indigenous home of the moufflon, elsewhere extinct.
Insani Montes
– the dangerous
mountains
– Diodorus of Sicily called them in the atlas he made of Sardinia in the first century bc. There has been no time in recorded history when outlaws have not roamed the Barbagia, and they are still as inaccessible to the prudent as they were when the Carthaginian, the Roman, and the Aragonese generals set up their outposts on the further side of this valley of Nuoro, and went no further.

The Townleys stayed the night at the Jolly Hotel, one of an Italian chain set up throughout the country to relieve the asperities of tourism in such provincial towns. In the morning, they told the receptionist that they would be keeping their room again that night, but as it was a fine warm day, had decided to go for a drive in the country. They asked for and were given packed lunches.

Leaving Nuoro, they followed the main highway for five miles in the
direction of Orosei, and then turned off into the narrow, winding and deserted road that leads to Orgosolo. Whether they knew it or not, the British tourists were now entering a most remarkable area. After two or three miles, the road passes through Oliena. Next comes Orgosolo where, barred by the mountain of Supramonte, the road loops away to the right to join the main Nuoro-Cagliari road five miles further on. The population of these small sad towns and of the mountains behind them are the descendants of Nomadic hunters that peopled Sardinia in
prehistory
. Of Orgosolo, Franco Cagnetta, the Italian social historian, had written, ‘Here life is essentially unchanged after thousands of years; one is at the centre – all the more astonishing because the centre itself does not realise it – of a civilisation that is infinitely retarded; that has inexplicably survived. This is the most archaic community of the whole of Italy – perhaps of the Mediterranean basin.’ As the people, so the landscape that has in part formed them. The mountain of Supramonte, which blocks the horizon south of Orgosolo like some flat-topped iceberg, is the bed of the sea thrown up by a cataclysm of 100 million years ago; its surface strewn with rocks gouged by the wind into fantastic shapes. The mountain has been hollowed out by vanished rivers, there are fissures a half-mile deep, vast unexplored caves, primeval forests of chestnut and oak, and the ruins of nuragic villages visited only by armed shepherds. The visitor to these parts from the outside world is warned not to leave the road, for this is the traditional stronghold of the bandit and of the vendetta.

Orgosolo, too, with its aroma of immeasurable antiquity has something to detain the traveller. In the greyness and the ugliness of its streets, one still sees figures from pre-history: old men in the stocking caps of the bronzes of the nuragic period of 1000 bc; an occasional shepherd carrying the triple reed-pipes depicted in the same bronzes. Sixty years ago, the whole town was built of
fughiles
, the most ancient of stone habitations consisting of a single circular windowless room (in which it was impossible to stand upright) and a hole in the roof to let out the smoke of the fire burning in the centre of the floor. A few
fughiles
still exist even if they are disguised these days behind the façades of normal
houses. Students of folklore find Orgosolo of extreme interest, and the high spot of any celebration is the apparition of the
mamutones
, the ancestral spirits, in sheepskins and tragic masks carved in wood, transporting the onlooker into an eerie animistic world that lurks here in the shadows behind a perfunctory stage-setting of Christianity.

The invisible life of the community is as singular. Nothing but
lip-service
has ever been offered to the state, and the only laws respected are the ancient customs codified in the
Carta de Logu
of 1388, on the eve of the extinction of a thousand years of Sardinian independence. Never since the overthrow of the rule of the Sardinian judges by the Kingdom of Aragon has the presence of authority possessed legal validity in the eyes of Orgosolo, which initiated nearly 600 years ago perhaps the longest resistance-movement in human history. Within the provisions of the famous
Carta
are laid down in minute detail the rules for the conduct of the vendetta. Orgosolo’s only building of significance is the Church of San Leonardo with the famous churchyard and its row after row of small wooden crosses marking the graves of men who have met tragic deaths. It has been stated in the Italian press that of a population of 4,500, over 500 men have died through the vendetta since the war alone. By local
standards
, none of these killings have been crimes: at the most, they are the malefic links in a chain of cause and effect, the payment of debts of blood, the almost mechanical retributions decreed by a revengeful Stone Age Jehovah.

The spot chosen by the Townleys for their picnic-lunch was a tiny
triangular
field half a mile from the outskirts of the town. Looking down from Orgosolo, it is the only green and pleasant place to be seen in any direction among the browns of the lean, sun-scorched earth. The owner of this small oasis of wild flowers and grass died mysteriously leaving no heirs to cultivate it. By chance, it offered an unusual amenity in the form of a small, oblong, flat-topped rock. It was the obvious – the only place for a picnic along the whole of the road they had come, and the Townleys, having pulled their small car into the roadside, climbed the low bank into the field, unpacked their luncheon boxes, and set out the contents on top of
the rock. This would have been about mid-day, and the Townleys had their lunch and were perhaps given a little time, too, to relax in the pleasant sunshine before they were interrupted by the appearance of a stranger.

Two days later, on October 30th, the London
Times
published a short description of the discovery of their bodies by shepherds. They had been riddled by bullets but, said
The Times
, ‘the motive for the killing is not clear. Wrist watches and other objects of value were left untouched. The theory is that they may have come across a band of outlaws, who impulsively shot them and fled.’

Other reports were more erratic and fanciful and, in the case of the
Daily Telegraph
, even self-contradictory: ‘… they were preparing for a picnic … the couple must have stumbled on a bandit hideout, and the bandits in the dusk mistook them for approaching police and opened fire.’ And a few lines further on: ‘According to a reconstruction of the crime, the attack took place (by the roadside) shortly after the passing of the regular bus in the early afternoon.’ The
Daily Telegraph
has the couple killed by a large calibre shotgun which it erroneously describes as ‘the customary weapon of Sardinia’, but next day it found that Mr Townley’s own pistol had been used. This report ends by sketching in the Orgosolo background, where some years before more than twelve people were killed ‘one by one after announcing the next victim’s name in crude paint on the white walls of the churchyard’.

But even the
Times
theory was not a tenable one. The Sardinian outlaw is rarely a pathological criminal, but almost inevitably a man who considers himself an unfortunate victim of circumstances with as clearly defined a moral code as the man who has not been obliged to take to the mountains. Under pressure of hunger, he will commit acts of banditry, but the Robin Hood image is always there at the back of his mind. He robs with a certain flair, never molests a woman, never takes from the poor. If obliged to kill, such a man does not act impulsively but after extreme premeditation. Never in these mountains had a bandit been known to kill a foreigner. Seventy-five years previously, in fact, when two Frenchmen had been abducted by bandits who had believed them to be Italians, they were released as soon as the mistake was
realised and sent back to Nuoro laden with propitiatory gifts. All Sardinia was aghast at this meaningless tragedy and, in due course, other and even less profitable theories were produced in an attempt to explain the inexplicable.

One of these was an attempted sexual assault on Mrs Townley, but it had to be dismissed as more than unlikely, for not only was the lady fifty years of age, but there were no signs whatever of any interference or struggle. A local newspaper improbably suggested that the Townleys’ death might have been the result of a suicide pact and printed an interview with a fellow guest at their hotel who, although he understood no English, claimed to have overheard them quarrelling. But if this was so, how was the fact to be explained that the Townleys had been killed with an Italian weapon which was never found?

By the middle of November, more sinister allegations were appearing in the Italian press. The suggestion now was that the apparently motiveless killing of the Townleys had been an act of terrorism designed to disrupt the nascent Sardinian tourist industry, and to discourage such projects as the Aga Khan’s development on the Costa Smeralda. On 15th November,
Le Ore
said: