By-Line Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway

Author:Ernest Hemingway [Hemingway, Ernest]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780743237123
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2015-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

There She Breaches!

OR Moby Dick off the Morro

Esquire • MAY, 1936

IT was a clear, cool day in October and we were drifting about three miles off Cabañas Fortress to the eastward of Havana. Inside of us were two or three skiffs also drifting for marlin, and further in toward shore we could see the calm surface of the Gulf Stream leap in sharp, minute splashes and hear the ta-ta-ta-tat of the machine guns firing on the rifle range, the limits of which were marked with red flags that showed on the white-walled green headland with the brown barracks behind it.

“Once,” said Carlos, who was sitting in the stern holding a line wrapped around each of his big toes, “we had a very big fish on close in to the Morro and those things began to splash all around us.”

“What did you do?” asked Lopez Mendez.

“Made the fish fast and dove overboard and only put our noses out until we drifted clear.”

“You’ve got a small nose,” said Lopez Mendez. “There’s no danger of being shot in a nose that size. But what if a fish strikes now and takes both your toes off? What do you do if a fish strikes now?”

“Watch,” said Carlos and pulling on the end of the line that ran to the rod tip he tripped the bight that ran around his toe so it was free. “You can release it from the toe instantly, no matter how hard it is pulling below. It’s a trick. We go to sleep with a line on our toe that way drifting in a skiff and turn it loose the instant the pull wakes us.”

“Everything’s a trick,” Lopez Mendez said. “Life is a very difficult trick to learn.”

“No,” said Carlos. “No Señor. Life is a combat. But you have to know lots of tricks to make a living. You have a good trick in painting.”

“Give me the trick of Enrique,” I said, in Spanish. “How do you feel this morning, Enrique?”

“Marvelous,” said Enrique who was dark, good looking, an aviator, a captain of artillery, and a good amateur matador and was living in Havana with his cousin, Lopez Mendez, the painter, between revolutions in Venezuela where they both came from. “I always feel good.” He grinned, furrowing the stubble of his beard that showed an hour after shaving.

“Last night,” said Lopez Mendez, who is very thin and distinguished looking, “Enrique ate only a straw hat and three candles.”

“I don’t care for eating straw hats,” said Enrique. “But if some one proposes it, naturally I will eat them.”

“He eats them very well,” said Lopez Mendez.

“I don’t like them though,” said Enrique. “I can never raise any enthusiasm for a straw hat.”

“What is he saying?” said the Maestro Arnold, from Minnesota, so called because he played the violin and who was on the boat as a photographer; as a very bad photographer.

“He is telling about eating a straw hat,” I said.

“Why in God’s name does he eat a straw hat?” asked the Maestro.

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