Circular No 981

 

Newsletter for alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.

Caracas, 22 of August 2020 No. 981

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Dear Friends,

On August 14, Alejandro Felipe Paula (1937–2018) passed away in Curaçao at the age of 81, Sorry for the news.

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Where are the Circulars?  Cornel de Freitas asked me some years ago.

And here is my response...

“Dear Cornel,

The photos are with me or at least I believe that they are, as I have not opened the February emails.

I try to mix the photos to keep the old old and the recent ALUMNI interested, so six photos might keep six Circulars alive, as I publish four per issue.

I have your letters in Circular No.389 also at least two photos.

Since I regard the Circular as a leisure stress free work, I take longer than some of you would like me to be. I get a little frustrated after being over 8 hour in front of the computer at work, as I do this between supper and going to bed, sometimes my eyes hurt at seeing the screen.

My idea of the Circulars is to gather ALUMNI and give them food of thought and be reunited with long lost friends. I started issue No. 1 with 10 ALUMNI and we are now with a few more than the number of Circulars published, I am sure Nigel agrees with the numbers.

I have about ten Circulars ready in draft format. So some news might wait for a least three months before published.

I only publish life or death news immediately. Sorry, that I have not reached to your photos as yet.

Please think that the Circulars need material but if I use all material as soon as they get to me then there would be times when I cannot publish the weekly Circular for lack of material.

This is the only reason that the Circulars are still being published while other have failed. Old news remains old even if published as soon as I get them. I place importance to keeping a regular mailing system, to keep the MSB memories alive.

An example, those that wrote five years ago quite long essays, have not been heard ever since, they do not have even an updated photo to share for us to know if they are alive.

Usually I hear from their friend after they pass away, this has happened in over a dozen of cases.

I have no excuse but please bear with me, and hope this is not going to keep you from writing.

But you can always be sure that I answer all emails, sooner or later.

I extended my reply because those of the 1950s claim that I do not take care of them, it is difficult to cover 40 years in each Circular.

God Bless

Ladislao”

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A Short Story by Wayne Brown:

November 17, 2002.

TITLE: ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

The car climbed up through the mango trees and the unflowering flamboyances, turned past the cattle sheds and on up the circular drive to the house. He opened the door of the house and she stepped out as though conferring a warm and generous favour on the ground.’

(Ernest Hemingway, **Islands in the Stream**)

‘The house’ is Finca Vigia (‘Lookout Farm’), the main residence of the hilltop estate a dozen miles east of Havana, Cuba, which Hemingway bought in 1941 with his earnings from the wildly successful **For Whom the Bell Tolls**, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Spanish Civil War.

The ‘she’ would seem to be a most curious mix (though, for those who know how fiction gets written, an entirely credible one) of Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, the famous German actress and **femme fatal** Marlene Dietrich – she and Hemingway were probably just friends, even if it suited each not to correct the media’s raunchy speculations about them – and Adriana Ivancich, the young Italian countess with whom Hemingway had fallen in love in 1948, when she was 18 to his 49, and who had already appeared in his fiction (as Renata in **Across the River and into the Trees**) and visited him at Finca Vigia.

The manuscript of which the paragraph above is a part had been in composition for several years when Hemingway, stung by the tepid reviews of **Across the River and into the Trees**, decided to break off the epilogue and publish it separately, as **The Old Man and the Sea**. (It won him the Nobel Prize).

And the mango trees and flamboyants and cattlesheds, in fact, the landscape as a whole, the sea, the light, and most of the human voices of both books, are unmistakably Caribbean, and led a later Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, in conversation with this writer, to call Hemingway the greatest West Indian novelist.

All that was half-a-century ago. Yet, just as, amazingly, Hemingway’s prose hasn’t aged since then, the approach to Finca Vigia was plainly recognizable from the paragraph above when this writer (from Trinidad) and his better half (from Jamaica) made the pilgrimage last June to the Cuban house where Hemingway spent the last 20 years of his life.

We got there from Havana by dint of a ‘private taxi’, driven by a woman-owner labouring under the illusion that she was saving gas by getting it up to speed, then putting it into neutral, letting it coast until it had slowed down, getting it up to speed again, putting it into neutral…and so on. And that unimaginably frustrating mode of travel (plus the fact that it was mid-summer and the air-conditioning wasn’t working) left this columnist in no mood to be told, on arrival at the tourist desk of the property, that the public was not actually permitted **into** Finca Vigia, but had to content itself with glimpsing the interior through the windows while being escorted on a walk around the house.

I made a terrific scene, proclaimed my Caribbean (as opposed to ‘tourist’) status, and – most tellingly, I suspect – demanded my money back. Whereupon, after much consultation in Spanish between what suddenly seemed to be many people, the Mermaid and I were primly escorted into the house – a victory that felt even sweeter when, while we were inside, a busload of Norwegian tourists arrived and began stalking us, it seemed, peering in through sundry windows at us and what we were looking at.

And I never expected it, but from that tour the writer of the finest prose of the 20^th Century – a man so unsympathetic in many ways to our modern sensibilities, and yet the composer of perhaps half-a-million sentences that shine today every bit as wonderfully as they shone 50 and 75 years ago – became even more heartbreakingly real to me than he had been. ‘The pity of it,’ I kept thinking, meaning both the awe and terror that inhered in a life so surpassingly masterful, yet, from its teenage years, aimed like an arrow at death.

As homes-turned-museums of famous writers go, Finca Vigia has been scrupulously preserved. Everything is there – from the paintings and the antelope heads mounted on the walls (trophies from Hemingway’s African safaris) to the rifles, the many pairs of boots, the hats, the zebra skin thrown on the sofa in his study where Hemingway’s partner Gary Cooper used to sleep when he visited (Cooper was too tall for the guestroom beds), down to the half-finished bottles of gin, Campari and Barcardi which the 62-year-old novelist, travelling to the States with the expectation of soon returning, had left standing on the bar.

(Hemingway, who throughout his life drank enough to be suspected of alcoholism, used occasionally to disprove the charge by covering his glass with a handkerchief held in place by a rubberband, placing a block of ice on it, and postponing taking a sip until the ice had completely melted.)

Next to the house, in an interesting if erroneous dabble in phallic psychology, Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth and last wife, had had constructed a three-storey tower, to the top room of which, she assumed, her ageing husband would repair to write his books. But Hemingway pronounced himself too ‘cut-off’ in the tower, and wrote instead standing (for a wound sustained in World War I made bending his knee painful) at an old office typewriter (which is still there) placed for height on top of a fat dictionary (still there) on top of a waist-high bookcase in the pleasantly West Indian bedroom, whose large windows, then as now, gave on to tropical, banana leaves-type shrubbery, which had the effect of softening the blare hilltop light to green.

But there were two things that, more than the rest concretized Finca Vigia’s owner for me.

The first was the books: more than 9,000 of them, many annotated in the margins by the Nobel prize-winning novelist. After the startled sight of those books had subsided –

Well, I thought, of course. Of course one of the very greatest of writers would be a voracious reader! It was a measure of the imaginative seductiveness of Hemingway’s pastimes – bullfighting, boxing, big-game hunting, deep sea fishing – that those books should come as a surprise; for they shouldn’t have. In a writer, what other passion could conceivably compete with reading?

Outside of his own, those books were all the additional testimony this columnist needed to the ardour of the artist’s spirit. And in the bathroom of Finca Vigia, scribbled in ballpoint on the wall above the scales, was the even more poignant testimony of the mortal man’s last, protracted struggle to go on living: daily recordings of his weight in ’58 and ’59: a final effort to return to health, in part by losing weight, in the face of illnesses that were progressively incapacitating him, and which finally drove him to take his life (in 1961, on a visit to Idaho).

But there is something I am not succeeding in conveying about all this; two things, in fact. They are (1) the feeling of Finca Vigia’s contemporaneity – as though all the bric-a-brac and words of a life spread out over a hundred years were in fact bunched together and taking place **now**; and (2) the geographical and cultural familiarity, the **Caribbean-ness,** of it – as though Finca Vigia might be in upper Barbican, or Jack’s Hill. 

When, last week, ‘Communist Cuba’ (as a Reuters report rather indignantly put it) ‘agreed to a US-funded project to preserve thousands of Ernest Hemingway's documents and photographs’ held at Finca Vigia, Fidel Castro joined Hemingway family members at a signing ceremony for the plan by the property’s large, square (and somehow gross) swimming pool.

‘Castro, 76,’ reported Reuters, ‘said he learned about irregular warfare in **For Whom the Bell Tolls** and had read the book three times before he took to the hills of eastern Cuba as a guerrilla fighter.’

Which helps explain one memento of my Cuba trip: a postcard entitled ‘Fidel y Ernest Hemingway La Habana 1959’.

In it, Castro and Hemingway are shaking hands; but the contrast between them is (that word again) heartbreaking. There is Fidel in his military fatigues, slender, tall, delighted, **young**. And there is the father of 20^th Century prose, still big of frame but wizened now of feature, white-bearded and with, visible on his forearm, the slack skin and pointy elbow of old age.

And he, Hemingway, is looking, not at Fidel, but off into the middle distance, with a wincing smile. As though greeting, while not particularly liking, the approach of something only he could see there.

END

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GEORGE MICKIEWICZ <amickiew@att.net>

Wed, Aug 12 at 8:17 AM

On August 14, Alejandro Felipe Paula (1937–2018) passed away in Curaçao at the age of 81.

Born and raised in Curaçao, Paula attended the Seminary of St John Vianney and the Uganda Martyrs, Mount St Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, between 1954 and 1958.

He then continued his preparation for the priesthood in the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, and Italy, but in 1963 he decided to quit the process.

He returned to Curaçao in 1964. In 1966, he married a Trinbagonian called Monica Beddoe (Trinidad and Tobago 1937—Curaçao 2017).

While Paula was a Curaçaoan ‘to de bone’, he always considered Trinidad and Tobago to be his second homeland.

In his autobiography titled The Cry of My Life (2005), he described his time at ‘the Mount’ and the people there who influenced him with much appreciation, humour, and love, including then Rector of the Seminary, Fr Ildefons Schroots OSB, Fr Peters, Fr Chris, and Br Vincent.

I was there for a few of the listed years (1956-1958) but do not remember him. 

Have added him to the Seminarian list in the database. 

If anyone remembers, please share your recollections for Ladislao to share them in a future Circular.

Please be extra careful and stay healthy, safe and sound,

George

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Csaba Jakobszen

Wed, 12 Aug, 14:18

Hi George,

Thanks for sharing this e-mail with me.

I was a classmate of Paula and we were very good friends!

I had lost touch with him for many years and a couple of years ago I got e-mail where there was an article about him that he was being active in local politics in Curacao and had a pretty good position.

I wrote him an e-mail but didn´t get any answer.

He was a very valuable responsible person and I am still sorry that I couldn´t get in touch with him.

May the Lord take him in his Glory!

Un abrazo

Csaba

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EDITED by Ladislao Kertesz,  kertesz11@yahoo.com,  if you would like to be in the circular’s mailing list or any old boy that you would like to include.

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Photos:

19LK4849FBAPA, Alejandro Felipe Paula

11LK8868FBALE, Allan Leo

58RB0001RBO, UNKNOWN and Roberto Bodington

58RB0003b6, UNKNOWN