Room 511 in the Hotel Ambos Mundos

I first visited the Hotel Ambos Mundos two years ago at the end of a rather epic day of Hemingway pilgrimages that began with a visit to the house he’d lived in for over 20 years, Finca La Vigía, on the outskirts of Havana in the village of San Francisco de Paula, and ended at the golden-friezed Floridita sipping a daiquiri at a seat in the left hand corner of the bar, Papa’s habitual seat.

It was a little after 5 by the time Hardy and I tromped up the five flights of stairs to room 511, the tiny little room where Hemingway lived, off and on, from 1932 to 1939. It was here that he began writing For Whom the Bell Tolls in the spring of ’39.

 

According to Michael Reynolds’ book Hemingway: The 30s, the author, who paid $2 a day to stay in Ambos Mundos, with its great views of the harbor and old Havana, when Hemingway started the book he stocked his room with “a 12-pound ham and 4 pounds of various cured sausages, recreating the Madrid larder for a writer who does not want to stop for lunch.”

And in Room 511, he typed the first page of the book:  We lay on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest and the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where we lay but below it was steep and we could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream along the side of the road and far down the pass I could see a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam white in the summer sunlight.

According to Reynolds, by the time Hemingway reached the third page, he went back with a pencil to revise every “we” and the single “I” to “he,” deciding almost from the start to write the story in the detached third person.

Anyway, by the time Hardy and I made it up the five flights of stairs, Hemingway’s room, which has become an ersatz museum of sorts, had closed for the day, though we could hear still voices and the shuffling of shoes on the wooden floor inside.

Hardy knocked insistently on the door and when that failed to do the trick, pounded on it with his fist.

“I don’t think they’re going to open,” I told him. I started walking down the hallway towards the stairs.

But Hardy kept pounding on the door. And sure enough, it opened—just a crack—and an attractive woman, the curator of the room, stuck her head out just long enough to emphasize that the room was closed for the day.

“Please,” said Hardy. “My friend here is a great Hemingway aficionado and we have come a very long way to visit this room. We have been to the Finca and to Cojimar, had a mojito at Bodeguita del Medio and it would just not be right to not see his room in the Ambos Mundo—even if only for a minute.”

 

And because Cubans are nothing if not gracious, the woman let us in—“For five minutes only,” she said sternly. But she could sense our passion and enjoyed talking about Hemingway, explaining, when Hardy asked, how the large man and his second wife, Pauline, were able to sleep in such a small bed (they didn’t; when Pauline was in town they spent the night at the more sumptuous Hotel Sevilla-Biltmore) and actually taking his passport out from the museum case and letting us hold it. It was a memorable visit.

So yesterday, two years later, I climbed the marble stairs in the Ambos Mundos again and knocked on the door of Room 511 late in the afternoon and Isabel, the same guide, opened the door once again. She gave me a funny look and then placed a hand on my arm.

“You were here before, yes?” she asked me.

“You remember me?”

And then she laughed. Of course I remember you, she said. You came when the room was closed and you stayed for an hour! We laughed about that.

“I am glad you have come back,” she said. And then she showed me some things I hadn’t seen on the first visit, things she made me vow not to tell others about.

Again I stayed past closing. And again she locked the door to Room 511 behind us.