AT THE beginning of March 1956, Ivy flew across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean in a twin-engined Convair PBY Catalina seaplane. She had crossed the Atlantic in a Superconstellation and followed the seaboard down from New York to Miami in a DC-4. She had laid over for a few days in New York and for a longer spell in Miami. There she had acquired the gear now piled up in the Catalina and made a deal with the discreet men now flying the aircraft towards Cuba.
“What would you say to Cuba?” Samuel Farakhan had asked her on New Year’s Day after coming back up from the basement into the Art Nouveau living room where Ivy was drinking another vodka and smoking another cigarette.
“La isla de cien mil putas?” she had replied. “You must be joking! I want to go to somewhere inaccessible. I want peace.”
“In the Sierra Maestra. There is not a soul in those mountains. You could spend a year there and see no one. Otherwise, where would you like?”
“Africa. The Indian Ocean. I’m beat. I don’t know. I think I need to sleep, Sam.”
“You certainly do,” Farakhan had said. “But think about it. Sleep on it.”
They spoke about it again on the morning of January 2 after breakfasting on buttered French bread and café au lait in the residence’s large kitchen and as they strolled outside over frost-covered grass whose yellowed blades crackled under their rubber boots.
“It feels as if you want me to go there rather than anywhere else,” said Ivy.
“Oh, not at all,” replied Farakhan hastily. “But I must say,” he added in a more measured tone, “that I don’t have confidence in your notion of an isolated place. In the Maestra, you would be a day’s hike from some village or road or other. If you had an attack of appendicitis . . .”
“I had my appendix out when I caught that Viet round in ’52.”
“But you get my meaning.”
“You’re always worrying about me.”
“Well, yes, I am.”
After a few moments of silence, Ivy had asked: “What do they have by way of animals in the Sierra Maestra?”
Halfway through that week she had returned to Paris for ten days or so, staying in a mansard-roofed room that she had bought previously on Rue Robert-Lindet in the Fifteenth Arrondissement and gathering information, planning, and making lists. When the window was open you could sometimes hear the clattering hooves of horses in Rue de Dantzig on their way to the Vaugirard slaughterhouse. The window was rarely open during that hard winter, though the room had to be aired and the cigarette smoke evacuated.
It was in February that Ivy had crossed the Atlantic in a Superconstellation. In New York she bought several things that she feared she would not easily find in Miami. She had accepted an invitation from a baroness, a supporter of arts and letters, to a soirée at which the great pianist John Lewis had performed. She drank too much vodka and the next day had a terrible hangover. That evening she took the plane for Miami, where she stayed for almost three weeks preparing for her trip and retreat. And now she was flying over Anguilla in the Catalina and crossing the Tropic of Cancer.* Ivy had flopped down amidst the bundles heaped up in the middle of the cabin. The pilot was smoking a cigar in his seat. The copilot had a bushy blond mustache and a teardrop tattooed beneath his left eye, meaning possibly that he had killed someone in prison. Both men were white racists from Texas.
Cuba could be seen through the windshield and the pilot beckoned Ivy over to see. She looked at the long island through trails of white cloud. The sea shimmered. The pilot smiled at Ivy and shouted something she could not understand because the noise of the two Pratt & Whitney engines was very loud. But the remark could not have been important, because the pilot, still smiling, turned his head and looked ahead once more.
After crossing the narrow island laterally, the Catalina turned above the Zapata Peninsula, so rich in saurians, flew over the Bay of Pigs, descended towards the Gulf of Cazones, and passed the Jardines de la Reina Archipelago. It was an old seaplane, over twenty-five years of age, much patched up and repainted in navy gray. At last, traversing the Gulf of Guacanayabo with its constellations of coral reefs, it alighted on the water a few kilometers from Manzanillo. A Zodiac inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor bore Ivy to the beach, where two negroes and two mestizos greeted her. They were normally cane cutters but Ivy had made long-distance arrangements with their employer for them to assist her. They had rough canvas pants, rough cotton or nylon shirts, straw hats with frayed edges, and a Ford pickup.
The copilot, who was maneuvering the Zodiac, remarked through gritted teeth that it made him sick to leave a young white woman, highly seductive and refined in his opinion, in the hands of a bunch of niggers. Ivy told him to get fucked but he did not get angry because she smiled at him.
The tarpless Ford pickup drove away, carrying the female traveler, her backpack, and her escort. It ran alongside a line of royal palms, then turned inland and vanished amongst pines. The temperature was 26ºC, the local time 1055 hours, and the date March 7, 1956. At that same moment the copilot was back at the Catalina and had climbed back aboard by the side door hauling the incompletely deflated Zodiac in behind him. The seaplane (strictly speaking an amphibian) started its engines, moved forward, turned, accelerated, lifted off and finally rose above the water and climbed revving into a bright blue sky where very high cirrus clouds drifted.
Ivy was heading for the Maestra.
She went as far and as high as the pickup could go. There, in a village, she paid her escort in dollars and dismissed them.
“And so,” Samuel Farakhan had said, “you intend to spend a year without drinking or smoking?”
“Absolutely,” Ivy had replied.
In the village she bought cigars, two liters of white rum and a mule, then she resumed her journey. At half past one she lunched on American army rations near a cluster of palm trees. She had not yet reached the altitude beyond which palms no longer grew. Fortified, she smoked a cigar. She coughed. She was wearing blue jeans, combat boots, and a khaki shirt damp with sweat on her back, under her arms and across her stomach. A baseball cap perched on her brown hair gave her a modicum of protection from the sun. She took a swig from the bottle and coughed again, though less violently. From the taste, the rum was more like tafia and seemed to have a seventy or eighty percent alcohol content. Ivy drank a little water from the canteen attached to her pack. She put the redoubtable rum back in the pack and the pack on the mule and resumed her upward progress.
Just after five thirty, knowing from experience how short dusk is in the tropics, she made no attempt to prolong her day’s march and chose to pick a campsite with great care in full daylight. She reckoned that she was now at one or two kilometers from her destination. And indeed, after being awakened very early the next morning by the screech of a parrot, after taking the time for skimpy ablutions and a breakfast designed to restore fighting men, but not very appetizing, she took only an hour to reach the place that she had picked out for her hideaway, or rather that Samuel Farakhan had persuaded her to pick out.
She was at an altitude of some 1,100 meters on the western flank of the Pico Turquino, which reaches a height of 1,994 meters, and at that hour she was necessarily in the shadow of the summit. The temperature was 17ºC, in other words about 70ºF. Later on it would go up to around 23 or 24ºC. It was a very fine day. The altitude kept the heat and humidity down, which was very pleasant.
Ivy relieved the mule of her backpack and chased the animal away. The mule would probably find its way back to Las Mercedes or some other village; or else some guajiro would find it and have a use for it: it might serve him as a work animal, or he might eat it, or take it down into the plain and sell it. Ivy did not care about the fate of the mule. She had known war very young. She had lost friends in war, in Germany in the spring of 1945 and in Indochina in the early 1950s. Her heart was not hardened but her skin was thick. She did not watch the mule going off into the pines. She was in a hurry to find a clearing—the one she had located on a map with Farakhan. But maps have a tendency to be wrong. Brush had now invaded the area, which was surrounded by oak and pine rooted in the sandy soil. It took Ivy two hours to clear it with a machete. In fact she cut back more than might have seemed necessary. The spot was now not just a clearing but a drop zone.
At half past eleven, satisfied and dripping with sweat, Ivy deemed her task done, went to sit at the edge of her DZ with her back against a pine tree, drank half the water in her canteen, ate almost a pound of dried apricots, and opened The Divine Comedy, the weighty book that Samuel Farakhan had given her on New Year’s Day, to page one:
When half way through the journey of our life
I found that I was in a gloomy wood
because the path that led aright was lost.
And ah, how hard it is to say just what
this wild and rough and stubborn woodland was
the very thought of which renews my fear.
“Enough!” she exclaimed in the solitude of the clearing, and she put Dante away in her pack and took out a paperback by Ed Lacy called Something on a Stick.† This book she read attentively until two o’clock, at which time, punctually, the gray Catalina made its appearance in the blue sky. It made four passes, the first one to get its bearings and decipher the rough signage that Ivy had laid out to indicate the direction of the wind and other useful details. (It was in Indochina that Ivory Pearl had learnt how to mark out drop zones.) On its three other runs the amphibious aircraft, flying in a sharp climb at a reduced speed and close to a stall, dropped six large, well-padded packages on the DZ containing all the material selected by Ivy for her year of solitude. Despite the padding, much of this equipment would certainly have been damaged had the bundles been simply dropped, but each of them was provided with a small parachute to slow its fall.
On the final pass, clinging with one hand to the frame of the open side door of the Catalina, the copilot gave a thumbs-up to Ivy. She responded in kind. They were no more than a few dozen meters apart, but then the pilot stepped on it, raced away grazing the treetops and disappeared flying southwest, plunging from the heights of the Sierra Maestra down towards the Caribbean, where he picked up speed and headed for Miami.
Ivory Pearl spent the rest of the afternoon beginning to set up her camp.
Two large tents were the main feature, both tall enough for one easily to stand up straight in beneath the hip of the roof. One of the two was to be Ivy’s living quarters, the other her storage room and lab, where she carefully arranged her photographic equipment and made sure nothing had been damaged by the drop. She had a Rollei and a Leica and a 6 cm-by-9 cm folding model, along with special lenses and adaptor rings. She had film and wads of photosensitive paper and cans of developer and other chemical products. She appeared to have everything she needed. She had enough dried and canned food to last her two or three months. She had tools. She had a sapper’s entrenching tool, heavy, foldable, adjustable, and olive green, with which she dug two trenches at a good distance from the tents, one for garbage, the other a latrine. Then she dug a V-shaped trench to protect her site from surface runoff. In March it barely ever rains in Cuba, but when camping Ivy went strictly by campers’ rules.
As she worked, over several hours, the photographer took a ten-minute break each hour to rehydrate herself. Just before six o’clock she went and filled two twenty-five-liter water bags from a tiny stream running between rocks some fifteen hundred meters from her camp. On her return she hung the containers from the main strut of the living tent and at last took some rest.
Many other jobs remained to be done. Shelves would need to be built quickly in order to place gear and supplies beyond the reach of animals. The interior of both tents had to be organized. A schedule would be required to lay down the time assigned to photographic work and that devoted to subsistence and maintenance. To add variety to her daily fare Ivy would be hunting with the strange gun with which she was equipped, an over-and-under Marble’s Game Getter resembling an exceedingly long pistol with an aluminum skeleton stock, a rifled barrel firing .22 Hornet ammo and a smooth-bore barrel for .410 caliber sporting cartridges. The young woman had also brought a Colt .45, certainly not for hunting but rather out of habit and for self-defense should the need arise.
“Alone,” she had said to Samuel Farakhan. “Alone and doing fuck-all. Listening to my thoughts, though I don’t have any. Listening to the birds in the shade of the woods. And sometimes—just sometimes!—taking my cameras and going stalking, snapping a few rolls of orchids or parrots or jacarandas, or of that little sod of a solenodon which exists there and nowhere else. Or even ants. Ants and little wild pigs. Taking my time. Having the time. By myself with time on my hands.”
Farakhan had sighed noisily into the mouthpiece, for this was a telephone conversation: he was in his residence while she was in Paris in her simple digs on Rue Robert-Lindet in the middle of January.
“Ah,” he quoted approximately, “is there anything more intolerable than being completely at rest, without passion, without business, without diversion, without application? Three centuries ago, I would have recommended the convent to you. And what’s more you would have left it very quickly. Perhaps you are soon going to tire of this current expedition of yours as well?”
“No. I’ll stick it out until the end of the year. I’ll see you on New Year’s Day 1957.”
“Touch wood,” Farakhan said. “Are you taking a pea-shooter?”
“Well, yes.”
“That’s good.”
“You know, Lieutenant,” Ivy said after a moment, “there’s something odd about your tone of voice. Does my trip bother you?”
“No,” Farakhan had answered. “You’re imagining things.”
“No,” Ivy echoed. “There’s a thought in your head but you won’t tell me what it is.”
“Sweetheart, I swear to you—”
“Don’t swear!” Ivy cut in. “No lies between us. Keep your thoughts to yourself, but don’t lie to me.”
At which Samuel Farakhan had fallen silent.
On March 8, 1956, Ivory Pearl lit a fire ringed by stones outside her dwelling, ate with relish, smoked half a cigar, downed three shots of very strong white rum, went back into her tent, rolled up in a khaki down sleeping bag and fell right to sleep at nine thirty as the night birds were calling.