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other musical presentation, longhair or jazz. He would only go to a prize fight that paired really good boys, and sometimes he made a special trip for a first-rate championship fight. Otherwise not. He avidly followed professional football on television when he was in the States (there was no
    United States television in Cuba), but he did not go to the games. He loved baseball and would go to any game; and occasionally he came to New York just to see a World Series.
    The only bars Ernest liked were Toots Shor's, the Old Seidel-burg, and Tim Costello's. I asked him about the story I had heard of the time that he got into a dispute with John O'Hara about their respective hardnesses of head, the dispute having been put to an abrupt end by Ernest's taking a shillelagh which Costello kept behind the bar, raising it up with an end in each hand, and cracking it neatly in two over his own head. I asked Ernest whether the story was apocryphal. He laughed. "Good story not to deny," he answered.
    One of the few things about New York that Ernest unreservedly enjoyed was the visits of the Ringling Brothers Circus. He felt that circus animals were not like other animals, that they were more intelligent and, because of their constant working alliance with man, had much more highly developed personalities.
    The first time I went to the circus with him, he was so eager to see the animals he went to Madison Square Garden an hour before the doors were scheduled to open. We went around to a side entrance on Fiftieth Street and Ernest banged on the door until an attendant appeared. He tried to turn us away but Ernest had a card signed by his old friend John Ringling North, which stated that the bearer was to be admitted to the circus any time, any place. We went below, as he always did before the circus began, and made a tour of the cages. Emest became fascinated with the gorilla; although the keeper was nervous as hell and warned him not to stand too close, Ernest wanted to make friends with the animal. He stood close to the cage and talked to the gorilla in a staccato cadence and kept talking, and finally the gorilla, who appeared to be listening, was so moved he picked up his plate of carrots and dumped it on top of his head; then he started to whimper; sure signs, the keeper said, of his affection.
    By now, all the keepers had assembled around Ernest, anxious that he try a few words with their charges, but he said that the only wild animal with whom he had any true talking rapport was the bear, whereupon the bear keeper cleared a path for him.
    Ernest stopped in front of the polar-bear cage and closely watched its occupant swing back and forth across the small area. "He's very nasty, Mr. Hemingway," the bear keeper said. "I think you're better off talking to this brown bear, who has a good sense of humor."
    "I should get through to him," Ernest said, staying with the polar bear, "but I haven't talked bear talk for some time and I may be rusty." The keeper smiled. Ernest edged in close to the bars. He began to speak to the bear in a soft, musical voice totally unlike his gorilla language, and the bear stopped pacing. Ernest kept on talking, and the words, or I should say sounds, were unlike any I had ever heard. The bear backed up a little and grunted, and then it sat on its haunches and, looking straight at Ernest, it began to make a series of noises through its nose, which made it sound like an elderly gentleman with severe catarrh.
    "I'll be goddamned!" the keeper said.
    Ernest smiled at the bear and walked away, and the bear stared after him, bewildered. "It's Indian talk," Ernest said. "I'm part Indian. Bears like me. Always have."
    Although Ernest liked to watch movies in his living room in Cuba, the only ones he went to see in New York were those based upon his books and stories, and then he went in a spirit of self-imposed duress. For days before taking the plunge, he would talk about his onerous duty of going to see such a movie and