241 Pizza

“Uh...yeah...close enough,” I said.

“Not American by any means. Ok, my friend, not two hundred. One hundred and fifty dollars for any book in his library.”

I realized now that he had thought my silence a negotiating tactic. I attempted to disavow him of that notion. “Look, I appreciate the offer, but I don’t know about this at all. I’m not sure if it’s...I actually think I have to go.”

“Que?”

“I need to go back to my hotel.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, uhm, well, I need to go to the toilet for one thing,” I said with grave finality. I thought that would be the end of the matter. Where I’m from in lace curtain Protestant Ulster - no one sober uses the word “toilet” unless they are quite desperate. In polite company it is taken as a sign that you are uncomfortable and any decent host will allow you to escape with dignity.

This nuance however was lost on the Cuban secret policeman

“Go here. We have a W.C. Through there,” he said.

I had no choice and in fifteen seconds I was in Ernest Hemingway’s famous water closet. Famous at least for biographers because it was here that he had kept a weight journal on the bathroom wall through various periods in the late fifties. Ahead of his time in many things, Hemingway had also gotten body consciousness a couple of decades before other American males.

I was not impressed. In William Faulkner’s house Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, I remember vividly examining Faulkner’s plan of his story ‘A Fable’ sketched on a wall. It was fascinating and wonderful, allowing you a peak into Faulkner’s mind at work. But this wasn’t wonderful. This wasn’t what I wanted from macho, bold, Ernest Hemingway. This was depressing. I looked at the parade of figures and the scrawly explanations next to them: “210 pounds,” “215 pounds after drinking,” “205 pounds after diet.”

I stopped reading after a time and instead began wondering how I was going to escape the secret policeman. Jump out the window? And if so, what then?

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