Met Papa
The kidnaping was reported all around the world, of course.
It took a few days for the full significance of the news to spread from Cuba to the United States, to the Left Bank in Paris and then finally to some small good café in Pamplona where the drinks were fine and the weather, somehow, was always just right.
But once the meaning of the news really hit, people were on the phone, Madrid was calling New York, New York was shouting south at Havana to verify, please verify this crazy thing.
And then some woman in Venice, Italy, with a blurred voice called through, saying she was at Harry’s Bar that very instant and was destroyed, this thing that had happened was terrible, a cultural heritage was placed in immense and irrevocable danger.…
Not an hour later, I got a call from a baseball pitcher-cum-novelist who had been a great friend of Papa’s and who now lived in Madrid half the year and Nairobi the rest. He was in tears, or sounded close to it.
“Tell me,” he said, from halfway around the world, “what happened? What are the facts?”
Well, the facts were these: Down in Havana, Cuba, about fourteen kilometers from Papa’s Finca Vigía home, there is a bar in which he used to drink. It is the one where they named a special drink for him, not the fancy one where he used to meet flashy literary lights such as K-K-Kenneth Tynan and, er, Tennessee W-Williams (as Mr. Tynan would say it). No, it is not the Floridita; it is a shirt-sleeves place with plain wooden tables, sawdust on the floor, and a big mirror like a dirty cloud behind the bar. Papa went there when there were too many tourists around the Floridita who wanted to meet Mr. Hemingway. And the thing that happened there was destined to be big news, bigger than the report of what he said to Fitzgerald about the rich, even bigger than the story of his swing at Max Eastman on that long-ago day in Charlie Scribner’s office. This news had to do with an ancient parrot.
That senior bird lived in a cage right atop the bar in the Cuba Libre. He had “kept his cage” in that place for roughly twenty-nine years, which means that the old parrot had been there almost as long as Papa had lived in Cuba.
And that adds up to this monumental fact: All during the time Papa had lived in Finca Vigía, he had known the parrot and had talked to him and the parrot had talked back. As the years passed, people said that Hemingway began to talk like the parrot and others said no, the parrot learned to talk like him! Papa used to line the drinks up on the counter and sit near the cage and involve that bird in the best kind of conversation you ever heard, four nights running. By the end of the second year, that parrot knew more about Hem and Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson than Gertrude Stein did. In fact, the parrot even knew who Gertrude Stein was. All you had to say was “Gertrude” and the parrot said:
“Pigeons on the grass alas.”
At other times, pressed, the parrot would say, “There was this old man and this boy and this boat and this sea and this big fish in the sea….” And then it would take time out to eat a cracker.
Well, this fabled creature, this parrot, this odd bird, vanished, cage and all, from the Cuba Libre late one Sunday afternoon.
And that’s why my phone was ringing itself off the hook. And that’s why one of the big magazines got a special State Department clearance and flew me down to Cuba to see if I could find so much as the cage, anything remaining of the bird or anyone resembling a kidnaper. They wanted a light and amiable article, with overtones, as they said. And, very honestly, I was curious. I had heard rumors of the bird. In a strange kind of way, I was concerned.
I got off the jet from Mexico City and taxied straight across Havana to that strange little café-bar.
I almost failed to get in the place. As I stepped through the door, a dark little man jumped up from a chair and cried, “No, no! Go away! We are closed!”
He ran out to jiggle the lock on the door, showing that he really meant to shut the place down. All the tables were empty and there was no one around. He had probably just been airing out the bar when I arrived.
“I’ve come about the parrot,” I said.
“No, no,” he cried, his eyes looking wet. “I won’t talk. It’s too much. If I were not Catholic, I would kill myself. Poor Papa. Poor El Córdoba!”
“El Córdoba?” I murmured.
“That,” he said fiercely, “was the parrot’s name!”
“Yes,” I said, recovering quickly. “El Córdoba. I’ve come to rescue him.”
That made him stop and blink. Shadows and then sunlight went over his face and then shadows again. “Impossible! Could you? No, no. How could anyone! Who are you?”
“A friend to Papa and the bird,” I said quickly. “And the more time we talk, the farther away goes the criminal. You want El Córdoba back tonight? Pour us several of Papa’s good drinks and talk.”
My bluntness worked. Not two minutes later, we were drinking Papa’s special, seated in the bar near the empty place where the cage used to sit. The little man, whose name was Antonio, kept wiping that empty place and then wiping his eyes with the bar rag. As I finished the first drink and started on the second, I said:
“This is no ordinary kidnaping.”
“You’re telling me!” cried Antonio. “People came from all over the world to see that parrot, to talk to El Córdoba, to hear him, ah, God, speak with the voice of Papa. May his abductors sink and burn in hell, yes, hell.”
“They will,” I said. “Whom do you suspect?”
“Everyone. No one.”
“The kidnaper,” I said, eyes shut for a moment, savoring the drink, “had to be educated, a book reader, I mean, that’s obvious, isn’t it? Anyone like that around the last few days?”
“Educated. No education. Señor, there have always been strangers the last ten, the last twenty years, always asking for Papa. When Papa was here, they met him. With Papa gone, they met El Córdoba, the great one. So it was always strangers and strangers.”
“But think, Antonio,” I said, touching his trembling elbow. “Not only educated, a reader, but someone in the last few days who was—how shall I put it?—odd. Strange. Someone so peculiar, muy eccèntrico, that you remember him above all others. Someone who—”
“¡Madre de Dios!” cried Antonio, leaping up. His eyes stared off into memory. He seized his head as if it had just exploded. “Thank you, señor. ¡Si, si! What a creature! In the name of Christ, there was such a one yesterday! He was very small. And he spoke like this: very high—eeeee. Like a muchacha in a school play, eh? Like a canary swallowed by a witch! And he wore a blue-velvet suit with a big yellow tie.”
“Yes, yes!” I had leaped up now and was almost yelling. “Go on!”
“And he had a small very round face, señor, and his hair was yellow and cut across the brow like this—zitt! And his mouth small, very pink, like candy, yes? He—he was like, yes, uno muñeco, of the kind one wins at carnivals.”
“Kewpie dolls!”
“¡Sí! At Coney Island, yes, when I was a child, Kewpie dolls! And he was so high, you see? To my elbow. Not a midget, no— but—and how old? Blood of Christ, who can say? No lines in his face, but—thirty, forty, fifty. And on his feet he was wearing—”
“Green booties!” I cried.
“¿Qué?”
“Shoes, boots!”
“Sí.” He blinked, stunned. “But how did you know?”
I exploded, “Shelley Capon!”
“That is the name! And his friends with him, señor, all laughing—no, giggling. Like the nuns