Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  By the end of the third day I could see that the oppressive

  Key West heat was certainly doing Ernest no good. His body was covered with prickly heat, and a lymph gland under one arm became swollen. "If this balloons up, we clear out of here fast," he told Mary. "I'd rather eat monkey manure than die in Key West." But the gland eventually subsided and he conceded that survival was a distinct possibility.

  Before returning to New York, I managed to have a private talk with Mary, who had been looking after Ernest marvelously, not reacting when he snapped and fulminated, and underscoring his moments of well-being. Ernest depended upon her heavily during those days and made constant demands to which she responded with good humor, but he also was very solicitous about her well-being and how she felt and if she was taking her various medicines, and he was highly complimentary about her cooking and housecare (there was no help). In the morning, to permit her to sleep late, he defended silence as he would have defended the finca if it had been attacked by a band of saber-toothed autograph-seekers. Mary and Ernest had become very close and loving and interdependent.

  I realized that both Mary and I were relying upon Ernest's huge powers of recuperation. Of course the heat was very bad for him, and Havana was bad for him, and not to have any fun the worst of all. He had always kept tab on his blood pressure and his weight and swallowed a few pills every day with his tequila, but it was a ritual that no one, including Ernest, really took seriously. Now it was different. It had all suddenly become very serious. And the drinking was different too. The Prize, coming as it did on the heels of the crash, had had the impact of another beating.

  It was apparent to me that it was essential for him to get away from Cuba and back to familiar and pleasurable haunts in Spain and France. It was bad for him to keep driving himself on the book he was writing. He was like a race horse who had won his race and passed the finish line but couldn't slow down and cool out before the next race. He was still running at full speed, but there was nothing to race against. He needed the quiet, unbuttoned freedom that he had always wisely used as his antidote against stress. For some reason he was now resisting it. Eventually, he would pack up and go, and it would restore him. But for the time being, he was hard to move. I was finding out that when he said he never left any place but with reluctance, he really meant it.

  Part Three

  For luck you carried a horse chestnut

  and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket.

  The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot

  long ago and the bones and the sinews

  were polished by wear. The claws scratched in

  the lining of your pocket and you knew your

  luck was still there.

  a moveable feast

  Chapter Ten

  Zaragoza ♦ 1956

  It took several months to achieve Ernest's exodus from Cuba, but what induced him to go was more a medical occurrence than Mary's and my gentle prods. Mary developed a recurrence of anemia, and when the doctor recommended a more temperate climate, Ernest issued emergency marching orders. "She is down to 3,200,000," Ernest informed me, "which isn't funny. Eisenhower has 5,000,000. Black Dog 5,200,000."

  I had gone to live in Rome and it was there that I heard from Ernest when he arrived in Paris. His plans were to drive to Madrid in a Lancia, larger than his last one, which was being driven over from Italy. He wanted to know if I would like to join him for the feria of Zaragoza, where the young matador Antonio Ordonez, with whom he had been so impressed in 1954, was performing.

  We met at the Gran Hotel in Zaragoza the afternoon before the feria was to start. Zaragoza is in northern Spain, 323 kilometers northeast of Madrid. It is an unattractive, crowded industrial city, with what must surely be the homeliest cathedral in Christendom—a cavernous, square, fortlike structure which at night glows with neon trim that runs all around it, and the inside resembles the waiting room of a suburban-Chicago railroad station. The Gran Hotel, the city's best, had possibly been wrought by the same architectural hand.

  I was in the lobby when Ernest came in; he seemed to have regained some of his old vigor in the few months since I had seen him, although his face was pinched and heavily lined. He was smiling, and as he came toward me I noticed he had resumed his old style of walking forward on the balls of his feet. We went into the bar to have a drink, and he told me about his trip down from Paris.

  "We stopped in Logrono, where we saw two fights. Antonio was wonderful, Giron very good and a Mexican named Joselito Huerta did the damnedest faena for exposure and variety and sheer cojones I've ever seen. He and Giron both dedicated bulls to us and laid it on the line like one Indian to another. Huerta cut both ears, tail and a foot in a tough plaza where they know bullfighting. Antonio wants to dedicate the best one he draws here in Zaragoza and will really put out. We have been hanging around together and he is a loving, unspoiled kid. Christ, how he can fight bulls! He has the three basics for being a great matador—courage, enormous skill, and grace in the presence of death."

  It was good to hear enthusiasm in his voice again—the dullness of Key West gone—and to see him looking forward to the coming feria as he had looked forward to things all his life. "Awful glad you got here—it shapes up as a beauty feria. Antonio fights three, Huerta and Giron two each, two new kids, one a friend of ours, Jaime Ostos, and Litri, who for me is a bum in spite of Kenneth Tynan, who wrote a book called Bull Fever after seeing fourteen fights." It was also good to see him using his left jab.

  He ordered another Scotch and half a lime, which he squeezed himself. "Didn't see any press in Paris, or on the way, or here. Been going good. Wrote six short stories when I quit fishing for the Old Man and Sea movie, and want to write some more here. Shooting season starts October fourteenth, so maybe we can make them feel the sting of a couple of hot guns from the American West. Georges is already at work on the Auteuil form and I made a preliminary recce before I left, so if you can spare the time we can actuate the old firm around the end of October." I had forgotten how he distrusted chance and how he planned fun as seriously as work, for he considered them of equal importance to Well-Being. He slid his drink closer to me and spoke intently. "Look, Hotch, my head is quite sharp now and not banged to hell like on our last trip to Spain when I was all beat up. So maybe I can make some sense about the bulls and the others things we like to talk about."

  A bellboy informed Ernest that the call he had placed to New York City was ready, and he left the bar, which was rapidly filling with pre-feria celebrants. While he was gone, a pretty young girl who had been sitting at the end of the barroom, eating grapes and drinking Tio Pepe, came over and offered me some grapes. "They taste better when you steal them," she said in American. I sampled one and agreed. "That's Ernest Hemingway, isn't it?"

  A tall, bony young man who had been hunched over the bar, drinking rum on ice and staring at himself in the mirror, cocked his head at us. "That right? Hemingway? Where?" He had a twang straight out of the Corn Belt. The girl quietly disappeared as the young man introduced himself: said his name was Chuck and explained that he was bumming his way around the world to get atmosphere.

  "Atmosphere for what?"

  "To write."

  "What have you written?"

  "Nothing. How could I till I get the atmosphere?"

  "How long you been in orbit?"

  "Three years."

  "You must have seen just about everything."

  "Nope. Just Europe."

  "Russia and Poland?"

  "No. That's Iron Country. I just seen Europe; now I'm headed Far East."

  Ernest returned, looking flushed and pleased. "That was Toots. Bad connection but we screamed it out and I got the bet down. Four hundred bucks on the Dodgers to take the Series."

  "They ain't got a prayer," Chuck said.

  Ernest turned a narrowed eye on him. "Who's the Horsehide Expert?"

  I introduced him and explained his mission. "Made up my mind back in Chillicothe I was go
nna write like you," Chuck said, unselfconsciously, "so I figgered I better go take a squint at the places you been writin' about."

  "Good reasoning," Ernest said.

  "Could I see you later on to discuss it?" Chuck asked.

  "Well, have some people lined up, but why don't you show up for dinner?"

  "Gee, really? You mean it? I mean, I didn't seriously think . . . gosh, I gotta run out and buy a shirt. I had this one on since Antwerp." He left hurriedly.

  "Probably hasn't eaten solid since Antwerp either," Ernest said. No matter how they shaped up, Ernest always offered hospitality and encouragement to any young person who was a self-avowed writer. Chuck was a monument to this Catholicism.

  A plump, pretty girl, who had been sitting with a group of mantilla-decked women, came over and said in solemn Spanish, "Your books have given me so much pleasure I wish to kiss your lips." She did, and returned solemnly to her table.

  The American grape-girl had returned, carrying a book which she asked Ernest to autograph. While he was writing in it, she said, "Mother said I'm not old enough to read For Whom the Bell Tolls."

  "How old are you?"

  "Nineteen."

  After she had left, Ernest said, "You know what frail volume she had for me to sign? To Have and Have Not, a teen-age work devoted to adultery, sodomy, masturbation, rape, mayhem, mass murder, frigidity, alcoholism, prostitution, impotency, anarchy, rum-running, Chink-smuggling, nymphomania and abortion."

  When you attend an entire feria you usually form up what Ernest called "a good feria mob," for the rigors of five or six or more days of continual bullfights, apartados, drinking, dancing, eating, and partying were such that a lone aficionado hardly stood a chance of survival.

  The mob for the Zaragoza feria consisted of Ernest's old English pal Rupert Belville and his lovely English companion, Polly Peabody; a Scottish couple, Rafe and Baby Henderson; the American writer-photographer Peter Buckley; and the Maharajah of Cooch Behar, an independent Indian principality, and his maharanee.

  At dinner that evening I was seated within earshot of clean-shirted Chuck, who proved conclusively that not one day of his three-year semi-worldwide investment had paid off. When he discovered that the handsome, dark-visaged gentleman to my left was a maharajah, he called over in nice clear Chilli-cothese, "Say, Maharajah, I'm headin' Far East. You know any one I can look up in India?"

  The maharajah, an Etonian, did not flicker an eyelid but said that he did and that he would give Chuck a letter to the head of the Indian Department of State. Chuck was delighted. "Gee, Maharajah," he exclaimed, "that's awfully white of you!"

  Mary immediately announced that coffee and cognac would be served in the bar.

  I had hoped that when Ernest overstayed the closing of the bar that first night, it would prove to be an exception, but it wasn't. He drank heavily every night, Scotch or red wine, and he was invariably in bad shape when finally induced to go to his room. He passed up the things that used to attract him— young couples, gay girls, rough cafes, the bullfight people, the fireworks display, the street carnival—preferring to sit for hours in a rooted position, with one or more listeners, not really caring who they were, sipping his drinks and talking, first coherently, then as the alcohol dissolved all continuity, his talk becoming repetitive, his speech slurred and disheveled.

  Ernest's mornings, unassailably vibrant all his life, were now silent newspaper-and-tea convalescences. Ernest would joke it off when I came into his room. "Am a little pooped," he'd say. "Went five rounds with the Demon Rum last night and knocked him on his ass in one fifty-five of the sixth." The morning drinks of tequila or vodka would partially restore him in time for his mob lunches, which he enjoyed, and he was back in full form by the time the bull-ring hour rolled around. Good or bad, he enjoyed the bullfights very much. "I once told Scott," he said, "that my idea of heaven was a big bull ring where I had two permanent barrera seats, with a rushing trout stream outside that could be fished by me and my pals. It's still my idea of heaven."

  But, in truth, the bullfights were a disappointment. On the opening card Antonio, Litri and Ostos all fought without distinction, and one of Litri's banderilleros was hooked against the planchon of a barrera and brutally gored in the groin. The other programs were equally undistinguished.

  On the day that Ostos brindied a bull to Ernest, Ernest rose in response to Ostos' outstretched hat and the bull ring gave him a spontaneous standing ovation, roaring his name; it was an awesome and moving sight to see those thousands of Spanish people, who do not express approval easily, on their feet, applauding an American. Unfortunately, this highly emotional brindying lacked a climax, for after fighting the bull rather well, Ostos couldn't kill him; he hacked him about the neck a dozen times until, weak from the blood-letting, the animal dropped to his knees.

  On another afternoon Antonio also brindied a bull to Ernest, but this was an even sadder event, for Antonio's entire faena was a failure. But by now Ernest had seen Antonio's brilliance too often to rate him out for an occasional bad performance. He had dinner with Antonio the last night of the feria and proposed that he and his wife, Carmen, go on safari in Kenya with Mary and him. Antonio, a handsome, bright, fun-loving man, assented immediately. That night after dinner Ernest talked effusively about the safari plans, drank very little and turned in early.

  We got a fairly early start for Madrid the following day, with a new driver, Mario, at the Lancia's controls. We had a lunch rendezvous at Fornos with Rafe Henderson, who was driving the others (sans Chuck) in his Mercedes. Ernest was in splendid spirits, and he talked and sang and told stories all the way. He sang in a tuneless husky voice, his repertoire ranging from "Hello, Frisco, Hello" and "My Sugar Daddy's in No Man's Land" (solo), to "La Cucaracha" and "Que Sera" (duets with Mary).

  "Well, Hotch," he said between selections, "it was a half-ass feria, but it had its educational aspects. On the first day we learned that contrary to published reports, blood does mix with sand. And, finally, by observing the retinue in the wake of Antonio, Litri and Ostos as they went through the hotel lobby, we learned another lasting truth: undeclared fairies follow bullfighters."

  At one point we stopped at a grated crossing and watched a coal-burning train chug by. Ernest began to laugh softly.

  "What's funny, lamb?" Mary asked.

  "That train. Took that train with Hadley. We'd been to Zaragoza to see Antonio's father, Cayetano, fight a mano a mano. What a beauty fighter he was! Hadley was in love with Cayetano and she wanted to go wherever he fought. Or didn't fight. Anyway, we used our last money for the tickets and we got on this train third-class to Madrid. Cayetano had thrown an ear to Hadley and she clutched it, wrapped in one of my handkerchiefs, next to her bosom all the way. The train was overcrowded. We squeezed into a compartment where there were two Guardia Civil with their guns slung across their backs, a boy taking three wicker-bound sample casks of his father's wine to a wholesaler in Madrid, two members of the clergy, and under the slatted wooden seats, three young ticketless bullfighters in hiding from the conductor.

  "The boy, who like all Spanish boys dreamed of the day he would be a matador, opened a spigot in one of the casks and let some wine run down into the mouths of the bullfighters, who were hot and cramped under the seat. He also passed wine in a cup to the Guardia Civil and to us, and although they declined the first offer, he finally converted the two clergy. As the conductor approached our third-class vineyard, I discovered I had lost our tickets, so Hadley and I got under the seat occupied by the two clergy, who spread their robes to hide us. By the time we reached Madrid the wine casks were empty and everyone was drunk. But we had a final problem—how to pass the station controller, who demands a surrendered ticket from everyone on exit. The two Guardia Civil put their guns at the ready and, one before and one aft, marched the five of us past the controller, pretending we were under arrest. The two clergy brought up the rear, reading their Bibles like we were marching the last mile."

  Listen
ing to the story, I began to think about Hadley and Cayetano. She was in love with him, Ernest had said, and carried the treasured ear in her hand. Ernest had identified Cayetano as the prototype for Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises. But Lady Brett's passion for him—was it derived from Hadley's infatuation with the lithe and romantic Cayetano? Brett, Ernest had said, had her genesis in Lady Duff Twysden, but Hemingway people, as he had demonstrated with Catherine Barkley, were compounded of many parts and I concluded that that part of Lady Brett that pursued Romero was as much Hadley as Duff. In The Sun Also Rises the ear of a bull is "cut by popular acclamation and given to Pedro Romero, who, in turn, gave it to Brett, who wrapped it in a handkerchief belonging to myself . . ."

  Identifying Hemingway heroines has been a persistent literary preoccupation and one of the most curious of these identifications centered around Renata, the beautiful young Venetian countessa of Across the River and into the Trees. Ernest had withheld publication of the novel in Italy because, he once told me, "too many of the characters in the book are still alive"; but finally, in 1965, fifteen years after its publication in the United States, the book was brought out by Mondadori, Ernest's publisher in Italy. Shortly afterward an article in the weekly magazine Epoca, also a Mondadori publication, boldly pronounced over Adriana's prominent by-line, "I am Hemingway's Renata."