The first time I heard about the Pilar or
actively spoke about it was in 1974 when I was living with my great-uncle
Leicester in Miami Beach. If my father mentioned it I was either too young to
understand what he was talking about or it was just another boat that he and
his dad happened to be fishing on when he was a boy in Bimini in the 1930s.
Leicester was much more descriptive and in his biography of his brother there
was a passage where he sees Ernest sitting in the fighting chair of the Pilar
at sunset in Key West taking swigs from a bottle of rum. My grandfather was a
tall man, as tall as my great-uncle, 6 ft., and strongly built, and back then
his hair was still black and he had a moustache. The white beard would come
later and the potbelly too. He was lean and young and Leicester writes that
that was the first time that he noticed all the shrapnel wounds in his legs
from the Austrian shell that had nearly killed him during the First World War.
It was a powerful image and one that stuck
with me as I moved from one house to another from Florida to Connecticut to Los
Angeles and then finally to Europe as a man. I could easily see him sitting
there and smell the salt water in the bay and feel the slight rocking of a
heavily built wooden boat in the waves.
Eventually my father would also write about
the Pilar and the Nazi U-Boat hunting expeditions that Ernest would organize
with a few friends and his captain, Gregorio Fuentes. Packing everyone aboard
the Pilar with supplies and a homemade bomb that they intended to drop into the
conning tower of an unsuspecting German sub, they would set out from Cojimar in
search of trouble. A slightly suicidal mission if there ever was one. How they
ever thought that they might get close enough to the U-boat to pull it off
before they were machine-gunned into the Gulf Stream is beyond me, but that was
the plan.
Luckily they never found the Germans except
for my grandfather’s fatal encounter with them at the end of his posthumous
novel Islands in the Stream. They
were never shot at, the boat survived and Ernest fished aboard her until he
left Cuba in 1960.
Today the Pilar is in dry dock on the
grounds of his house the Finca Vigía outside of Havana. It was painstakingly
restored in 2007 and is kept under a steel awning that protects it somewhat
from the elements. I say somewhat because when I saw it for the first time last
Thursday I noticed that the varnish on the wood in the cabin had already
started to chip and peel. What impressed me though was the size of the boat, something
that photographs can never really convey. I could finally see it with my own
eyes and imagine my grandfather standing on the flying bridge above the cabin
because it was obvious now that it was strong enough to support someone as big
as Ernest. Likewise I could see my Uncle Patrick as a young boy sitting in the
fighting chair as he wrestled with a huge marlin for hours, just like the
second son of the protagonist of Islands
in the Stream does.
But the Pilar itself was an archive of
dreams and past lives, which I could not avoid now in her presence. I could
feel my father and my Uncle Leicester. I could sense their energy and their
pathos and I knew that while they were gone and I missed them dearly that they
would always be here in this place, with this boat.
