Finca Vigia
The recent launch of the Trinidad Vigia sent us on a search for the meaning of the Spanish
Vigia. Mark Whitty writes about Ernest Hemmingway’s Havana home.
Ernest Hemingway’s home in Key West was listed on the visitors’ map. The
pathologically shy writer was not best pleased. Declaring that he would: “Rather
eat monkey manure than die in Key West.”, he accepted an invitation from Martha
Gellhorn, a gal he’d met in Sloppy Joe’s, to report on the Spanish Civil War.
Finca Vigia (‘Look-out Farm’) lies nine
miles south of Havana, in the village of
San Francisco de Paula. His new warcorrespondent [third] bride found the
house in the small ads. Tin-roofed wooden
shacks and hard basic drinking sheds
lined the short rowdy path to the gates.
Having fixed the roof, re-plastered mouldstained walls, Hemingway bought the 15
acre estate for 18,500 pesos with a royalty
cheque from his sweeping tale of the
Spanish Civil War: For Whom the Bell
Tolls was a big hit. By a strange twist of
fate, Fidel Castro, would soon be using it
as a primer for waging guerrilla war in the
Sierra Maestra.
Hemingway found time to do things
most men only dream about. Between
the battlefields; hunting; bullfighting;
fishing and boxing, he allowed time to
write. Indeed, he gave equal dedication
to everything he did. When Hemingway
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was author, the change in his life-style was
dramatic, the discipline of work absolute.
In his bedroom his large desk supported
stacks of letters; good-luck charms and
an assemblage of memorabilia including
international newspaper articles about
his presumed death in two different
plane crashes in Africa; Michelin maps
of Spain annotated with names of people
he met, restaurants and hotels he visited.
All details he wished to remember for his
writing.
He never worked at the desk. From five or
six in the morning, his portable typewriter
on top of a bookcase near his bed, he stood,
in a pair of oversized loafers, on the worn
skin of a kudu. The door to his bedroom
remained inviolate until one o’clock, when
he would emerge, mix a drink and read the
newspapers before lunch.