An old man released in the sea

It’s tinest than a dot on the map but it was the shelter of stars, honest fishers, a prince, and especially Hemingway.

 

Written and photographed by Luis Paucar Temoche

 

EL ALTO, Peru – everybody stopped to wait for him when the plane began to land over the airport lane. A morning, beginning the autumm, April 16th, 1956, Ernest Hemingway appeared smiley in the door of the Pan-American Grace airline’s Douglas DC7B plane in Talara, a Peruvian Northwestern city, with the elegance of a tourist who sets sailing in search of relax.

 

It was 7:30 in the morning and the writer looked a wwhite beard of many days. He wore a checkered khaki suit, a blue shirt that fit him slimmed, and a long tie he set carefully every certain time. Sometimes he said hello to the journalists. “Ernest, ernest, Ernest,” they said and shot the flashes of their old cameras. “He puffed his rabbit’s chicks and smiled again,” Manuel Jesús Orbegoso says in one of his chronicles. “everything was smiles.”

 

Outside the Windows, Cabo Blanco awoke as accostumed, with that tender light that turns on around noon and heavy fog in the edge of the sea. “(In Cabo Blanco) there was all,” a local Will say. “The sea was very generous.”

 

After a trip to Africa, thousands of miles away there, this time turned to Hemingway crossing the world again. The traveler life. Old Miller, that morning, had arrived with his wife Mary Wells from Miami, Fla., going through a portion of American continent toward the south.

 

A Saturday morning, two days before, a Warner Brothers’ technical crew had arrived to Cabo Blanco to install its equipment and building the set of The Old Man And The Sea motion picture. In that beach, to the north of Talara, it was to roll some scenes of the film based upon the play he published for the first time in Life magazine in September 1952, which he deserved the Pulitzer Prize one year later. Ernest Hemingway followed then the discrete steps of a blonde flight attendant wearing a short dress.

 

The writer knew that it was possible to capture black marlins at that beach like he described in his novel, because in Cabo Blanco, he had learned, the high fishing was practiced. A 1953 summer day, three years before his arrival, the scoop was the American Alfred Glassell Jr fished the world’s biggest black marlin in this beach. “What an animal!,” a white-&-black photo capture screams. The animal was about 1560 pounds, the average weight of a just born gray whale.

 

I don’t chase them, they chase me

Ernest Hemingway was 56 years old then, had three women whom he had left away, two awards on his back, and an enviable fame – and it was the first time he flew to South America (Peru was the only country he visited). That day, just going down the plane with a long smile and testing his steps, Hemingway said hello to the journalists with a Laconian gentleness. “Hola, colegas,” he said them.

 

The writer spoke a perfect Spanish. He had a big affection to the sea and the whisky but never to his presence. “I prefer not to see myself on the mirror,” he would say giggling. Ernest Hemingway proclaimed he ever had luck, that the journalists like him had to hold on too much that the drink only could relief it, that the death was a prostitute that wanted to sleep with him, and that the great adventures came to look for him. He never chased them, “they come alone.” He said that in the press conference after leaving the 4-engine plane which he had arrived that day of April.

 

The motion picture was directed by John Sturges and no one figured out it would be a fiasco. Similar things happen in the life of the writer. Any shot made in Cabo Blanco would be included. Ernest Hemingway had also arrived with Enrique Pardo Heeren, the founder of the Cabo Blanco Fishing Club and the Captain Gregorio Fuentes. They accompanied him in his adventure, but the fishing club’s founder.

 

What did the sea mmean for Hemingway, then? Drilling into his life is meeting a wounds collection. The sea maybe could be that store where he could find peace, inner tranquility. “It can’t lie before it,” Hemingway said, and his scholars say now he begged love everywhere. He had a disturbed childhood. His mother mistreated him and wore him like a girl, it rained the bad critics to his plays, and his plans, they say, ever ended stroked. The typical adventurous life. It insists in sticking the abnormal tag, although he hadn’t wished it.

 

From the narrow lane driving to Cabo Blanco, the landscape is only a handful of thin trees with their dry branches, shy soil as much as it looks like a big block, and a too blue sky that it doesn’t admit clouds. The car advances with a mourning stubbornness that doesn’t lully, while some passengers spit through the bus window that it’s now a dot missing among the dust, the loneliness, and the graceful desert. The lane sees little, too monotone that it invites to dream.

 

That April morning, already at the airport, the wheels of a pick-up surprised suddenly with a drilling noise. After closing the press conference, Ernest Hemingway ordered his liad hair revolved by the air and walked to the car saying with a briefed amaeability: “Thanks a lot, colleagues – that’s it.” The writer would arrive one hour later to Cabo Blanco, around 10:00 in the morning, he would accommodate in the Fishing Club –in the room 4, —he would wear a stripped t-shirt and a bermuda, and a white cap, and so, ready, he went out to fish in his first sunny day.

 

Today Cabo Blanco already doesn’t appear in the world fishing routes, but then it had the power to attract the best sport fishers and people like Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Cantinflas, the Prince Phillippe of Edimbourgh, the Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín, Leonardo Di Caprio, Cameron Diaz, Salma Hayek, or Ricky Martin.

 

“Cabo Blanco already lost that fame it had before – now it’s a beach trying to recuperate it,” Juan Chávez Rondoy says sat down in a table of the restaurant he manages. The former deputy mayor of the fisher district seems ressigned. Before, the black marlins were the most appreciated in the world, and now the beach people is happy by seeing tiny or medium-big fishes. “Foreigners came from their countries to fish here,” he continues. “Today not anymore – it’ll be surely a Nature matter.”

 

To the restaurant where we talk in a beginning-June morning, a yellow light comes in and a sea wave can be seen shocking in the rocks without regrets. It’s 9:00 in the morning, and at this time, Cabo Blanco Beach shines without any tourist.

 

Hosting memories

To reach the Fishing Club, it has to walk a little from Cabo Blanco downtown. The place where the writer accommodated is on a mont of pretty dry sand, hot soil, and provocating little sweat drops trotting from the forehead to the eyebrush. The Trail to the place is only sand, more sand, a very thin lane, sand again, the lane that continues in a curve, land, and finally the old and lonely building.

 

The Fishing Club is not recognized among the hotels of the world that the writer stepped in. Casa Burguete, for example, where he was just few days is today a very attended museum. There is a stone monument honoring him in Pamplona, Spain. His desk is in Florida. In his Key West’s house, more than 60 pets live – they’re some fat and tender cats, kids of the older cats, those can be seen by the tourists while they walk knowing more about his owner’s life – Hemingway.

 

Photos here, photos there. On the way to the Fish Club, there is only wind, flying sand, and much Sun, a sun that seems to make cracks in the hills and that grants some difficulty to the trail. Coming into the Fishing Club at noon is like visiting a horror house –at night, it must seem a place with paranormal effects: the ghost of Old Miller must go around there—but the floor is pure rectangular wood tile.

 

In the room 4, where he accommodated, there is a smell own of old stuff, some white and sad walls that somebody was in charge of painting after the whole room was red ocher color. There are shelves full of dust. In the first floor of the hotel, there is a swimming pool without water. The table where the whisky was served is also under missing years. From the manager office, it only remained a walnut-colored furniture.

 

If you wwant to get to the room Hemingway was, you must come in by the door wwhere there are some sticky letters, walk ahead, turn right, then left. The writer’s room is in the first floor. Where an almost-4-meter  dissected black marlin should be, the same that Alfred Glassell Jr fished in 1953, there is nothing. And finally on a corner, sticked to the wall, it appears a newspaper excerpt written in French that says: “C'est le club de pêche exclusive du Cabo Blanco,” This is the exclusive Cabo Blanco Fish Club, “Ici sont divertis de nombreuses célébrités,” the proof that all this place was exclusive once upon a time.

 

It was called Miss Texas and it was the ship which the writer ran the sea of Cabo Blanco. It was big, white –inside it looks like a toy: a walnut-colored box, with little tables, and well ordered seats—, majestic like these times.

 

Instead, Mary Wells went on the Pescadores II luxury yacht. Old Miller ever spoke kind. He told about his writing style, his adventures, the bitch death, as he said, and his play that was filmed at the beach. He was simple, according to they say. He broke up that glamour the famous who arrived to Cabo Blanco were engaged.

 

Once a day, May 21^st, 1956, ernest Hemingway sat down to write a letter to Marlene Dietrich, his muse, that German actress and singer, curly blonde and pretty short hair, bread-color soft skin, and an unremaining cigarette between her fingers. The story among them has much romanticism.A young Hemingway had met her in a cruise aboard the ile de France, 22 years before, and since then, he began to write her until his suicide.

 

47 years after that sending, a 2003 day, Marlene Dietricht’s daughter Maria Riva gifted 30 letters that Hemingway had sent to his mother, to Boston Library. Here it was the submitted from Cabo Blanco Beach. What mistery did the date keep? The writher could say to the journalists he was to spend only one month. The locals, however, didn’t know how many time.

 

The persons who attended him coincide in one thing – he was more than 30 days, but how many exactly? “he said he wished to spend more time,”  a fisher who came out to fish with Hemingway says me. He enjoyed to know that, since then, to the beach started to arrive people who wanted to know more things about the writer’s visit. They began to speak them about the sport fishing, the marlins, the motion picture it was filmed there, what happened at the sea when they fished with him. “How many time did Ernest Hemingway spend around here? More than 30 days,” the locals responded. “It was 36, actually.

 

And the myth was made

A magic collection of psychic wounds, a set of falls or maybe a lot of horrors. That could have been the life of Ernest Hemingway, who never could be normal. His carácter is as irregular as the sea. Sometimes one realizes nothing makes sense in the life of this writer. That the geniuses, after all, ever must leave a lazy emptiness sensation for you start missing them.

 

What’s the sense in listening to the locals who attended to Hemingway? Then, ones Will say they are already old and they invent more things everytime. In Cabo Blanco, three of these persons  still live: Maximo jacinto Fiestas, the one who set the bait, the trap of black marlins (these fat animals that were the attraction of this beach that once upon a time appeared in the world sport fishing routes). Also, Rufino Tume, Captain of one of the yachts, and Pablo Córdova Ramírez, a man of very rounded eyeglasses who prepared the drinks to the writer.

 

The three remember him. They have mythified the visit of Old Miller. Anyway, Ernest Hemingway couldn’t be more than that – and undeleteable print. It’s 5:00 in the afternoon of a beginning-June day, and there is a soccer match –the streets are empty but a car stop where someones wait for a taxi—, the ships follow grooving on the sea, and some white birds fly in a ripped sky.

 

Cabo Blanco Will awake again as accostumed, with that tender light that turns off with the sunshine. Some hours will pass before the sky isn’t sky color but a purple layer ripped of yellow, orange, some lilac tones. Now, instead, everybody is sticked to a TV-screen that broadcasts the soccer match. Nobody allows a dream with sealions.

 

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