Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  Antonio took us to a club where there was a loud orchestra with everybody singing as they danced, and we had such a hell of a time we almost missed the first running of the bulls.

  Each day of the feria, in the early morning, the bulls for that day's corrida are released from the pens at one end of town and they run along a street that leads to the bull ring. It is traditional to join the group of men and boys who race down the street in front of the onrushing bulls: front runners get a big head start, middle runners keep a modest distance ahead, and then the brave ones or crazies, depending on your point of view, try to stay as close to the bull pack as possible without getting gored.

  Ernest ran with the bulls in the old days but now his legs were too unreliable. Antonio, of course, ran just in front of the bulls—with the crazies. I ran at the rear of the middle runners where, glancing over my shoulder, I had a good view of the bulls and the crazies. We were about halfway to the ring when the crowd, which solidly crammed the fences and windows and balconies, suddenly cried out, and I looked back to see that one of the crazies had slipped and a big black bull with huge antlers had splintered off to get him. That's when I noticed Antonio. He had been carrying a rolled-up newspaper and now he was running over toward the fallen man, unfurling the newspaper and yelling, "Toro! Huh! Toro/" at the bull.

  The bull hooked once for the fallen man but his horn went over him and then Antonio swept the newspaper in front of his eyes and he went for that. The fallen man scrambled to his feet and ran as Antonio again passed the bull with the newspaper, but this time the paper recurled itself and uncovered Antonio's leg and the horn got him. At that moment Ernest, who had rushed to the fence, pulled off his jacket and flapped it against the fence and the bull charged that, banging his horns into the wood planks, which he splintered. Antonio limped to the opposite barricade, which a policeman opened to let him escape.

  I had stopped running to watch Antonio but now I realized I was being swept up by the vanguard of the crazies, who were coming on fast with the phalanx of horns on their tail, so I got the hell out of there with a burst of speed that only wild bulls can inspire.

  Antonio's horn wound was in his right calf, but because of the ignominious manner in which it had been inflicted he refused to pay any attention to it. He danced all day and night and then again ran with the crazies the following morning just to prove whatever he wanted to prove. Only then he finally listened to Ernest and let Vernon Lord give him an antitetanus shot and clean and dress the nasty gash.

  Ernest was absolutely correct about sleep and the lack of it. I went to my rented room only once; it was dark and smelled of urine from the flat's one toilet which was next to it, so I never went there again. Instead, whenever I felt like sleeping for an hour or so I curled up in the back of the Pembrook Coral. Sometimes Ernest would join me and sleep sitting up in the front seat. He had recognized several pickpockets of superior talent who were working the feria, so when we slept in the car we put our money inside our pants. Before going to the bullfights, we all gave our valuables to Ernest, who stowed them in his pickpocket-proof Hong Kong jacket.

  Teddy Jo and Mary Dos (Mary Hemingway, naturally, was Mary Uno) became inseparable members of the basic cuadrilla; when Ernest discovered that they both taught mathematics he was delighted because, he said, it wasn't often a cuadrilla got beauty and intellect in one handy package. But on the second day we lost one of the mob—Mervyn Harrison of Hawaii. Quite simply, he overslept and failed to show for that afternoon's bullfight, letting the hard-to-get and much-sought-after ticket go to waste. Then, that evening, when Ernest asked him if they had taught him how to oversleep at the Sorbonne, he confessed that he had not gone to the Sorbonne with Ernest's borrowed money but had discovered a superior way to learn French. "I met this Paris girl," Mervyn said, "who could not speak a word of English, so when we started to sleep together I had to learn. I tell you, Papa, that's the place to learn a foreign language— in bed!"

  "Yes, but what you learn there," Ernest said, "is sometimes difficult to work into an ordinary, everyday conversation."

  I don't know precisely how Ernest handled it, but we never saw Mervyn again. When he did not reappear Ernest simply said, "Well, our boy, Mervyn, has just become a complete stranger. Never discuss your casualties, gentlemen."

  Just to the northeast of Pamplona are the Irati River and its forests, which were such an integral part of The Sun Also Rises; Ernest was afraid that they had been completely ruined, but his fears proved unfounded. For four afternoons we picnicked at various places along the river, going higher and higher up the mountain, leaving at noon, getting back just in time for the bullfight. We traveled in three cars, each car responsible for part of the picnic, which flourished with squabs, cheeses and cold smoked trout, Navarre black grapes and brown-speckled pears, egg plant and pimientos in a succulent juice, unshelled shrimps and fresh anchovies. The wine was kept cold in the clear Irati water, and each day we swam up the river, which flowed through a gorge between the high-rising walls of the beech-covered mountain. It was miraculous to leave the wild tumult of the feria and a half hour later to be in the midst of this primitive, quiet beauty.

  One day after lunch Ernest and I sat on the pebbly bank, contemplating the view, which consisted of circling hawks, rising mountains, and the seven women of our cuadrilla who were napping at various levels on warm rock ledges above the opposite bank. "Nymphs on shelves in nature's store," Ernest said. '"What a hell of a happy time." He watched a hawk plummet earthward and disappear, then re-emerge beating skyward with a small prey struggling in his talons. "You know, Hotch," he said, his eyes on the hawk, "it's all better than The Sun Also Rises."

  Ernest sat with his back against a beech trunk, his lips pleas-urably parted, his old eyeglasses in his lap, patting an itinerant hound dog who had sought him out, and as I studied him I thought, This is different for Ernest than anything we have ever done, for this is not the enjoyment of memory, but the enjoyment of experiencing. This summer we are not revisiting the windswept slopes of the Escorial to see the vestiges of For Whom the Bell Tolls, or driving slowly along the road he once cycled with Scott Fitzgerald or walking along the circuitous Left Bank route he used to take from his unheated room to the Jardin Luxembourg to avoid the tantalizing restaurant smells; this summer, unlike the others, is young.

  When we got back to Pamplona that afternoon, having missed the bullfights, there were two cables waiting for Ernest. One was from Toots Shor: ernie, where shall i send the four thousand bucks, you bum? Ernest laughed. "Toots is burned up because I phoned him from Malaga, just before we met you, and asked him the odds on Johansson against Patterson. When he said the boys were laying four to one on Patterson I told him to put down a G for me on the Swede, but he tried every which way to talk me out of it. I don't bet much on fights any more. Have a new rule: never bet on any animal that can talk—except yourself."

  The other telegram was from David O. Selznick, who had just completed a remake of A Farewell to Arms with his wife, Jennifer Jones, starred as the novel's heroine, Catherine Bar-kley. He had not paid Ernest anything for this version because back in the Twenties the book had been sold outright with no provision for remakes. This telegram said that Selznick had just informed the world press that although not legally obligated to, he was hereby pledging himself to pay Mr. Hemingway fifty thousand dollars from the profits of the picture, if and when it earned any profits.

  Ernest, who had never kept secret his lack of affection for Mr. Selznick, dictated a telegram in reply saying that if by some miracle, Selznick's movie, which starred 41-year-old Mrs. Selznick portraying 24-year-old Catherine Barkley, did earn $50,000, Selznick should have all $50,000 changed into nickels at his local bank and shove them up his ass until they came out of his ears.

  After Pamplona we rested for a few days in Madrid before going down to Malaga for a birthday party that Mary Uno had been working on for nearly two months. July 21st was Ernest's sixtieth birthday and also the birthday
of Carmen, Antonio's wife; the Bill Davis house, La Consula, in Churriana on the southern coast of Spain, was to be the locale. Set in the midst of a huge, elegantly gardened estate, La Consula is a colonnaded mansion of delicate mien that looks like the palace of a junior Doge. It is protected by outer and inner gates, both manned, and its furnishings, mostly handmade by Spanish artisans working from Bill Davis's designs, and its art complement its exterior. Floors and balustrades, stairs and table tops, bathrooms and porticoes are all marble, and marble envelops the swimming pool. There is no telephone.

  Mary really knows how to give a party and she pulled out all the stops on this one. She felt that Ernest's birthdays, because of his lack of co-operation, had always been observed with a pause rather than a celebration, and she was determined to make up for all the lost birthday parties this time. She succeeded.

  She had ordered champagne from Paris, Chinese foods from London, and from Madrid, bacalao, which is a dried codfish that is the basic ingredient for the highly seasoned Bacalao Vizcayina, one of her specialties. She had hired a shooting booth from a traveling carnival, a fireworks expert from Valencia, which is the citadel of fireworks, flamenco dancers from Malaga, musicians from Torremolinos, and waiters, barmen and cooks from all over.

  The Davis house sleeps only twenty-five, so Mary had taken over a couple of floors of a new skyscraper hotel, the Pez Espada, on the beach in nearby Torremolinos. The invitees came from all over, and they began arriving on the twentieth.

  In addition to the members of the regular Pamplona cuadrilla, Ernest had invited a large number of other Pamplona people and some from Madrid. There also arrived the Maharajah of Jaipur with his maharanee and son, the Maharajah of Cooch Behar with his maharanee, General C. T. "Buck" Lanham from Washington, D.C., Ambassador and Mrs. David Bruce, who flew down from Bonn, various Madrid notables, several of Ernest's old Paris pals, thirty friends of Antonio's, and Gian-franco Ivancich, Adriana's brother, who arrived from Venice with his wife driving Ernest's new Barrata Lancia which had been bought out of his Italian royalties.

  The prisoners, Mary Dos and Teddy Jo, had torn up their AAA motor itinerary, which would have taken them to ninety-two cities in sixty-two days, and Honor Johns had permanently forsaken her allegiance to her Glasgow weekly.

  The party started at noon, July 21st, and ended at noon, July 22nd, and Ernest said it was the best party that ever was. He danced and popped champagne, proposing marvelously funny toasts to his guests, and shot cigarettes from the lips of Antonio and the Maharajah of Cooch Behar. When the orchestra, which played on the upper veranda, struck up the fiesta music of Pamplona, Antonio and Ernest led all the guests in a riau-riau that snaked all over the grounds. The one sober moment of the evening occurred at the end of the dinner when David Bruce, with whom Ernest had fought in the war, proposed a simple and affectionate toast; Ernest bowed his head against his chest and was visibly touched.

  The firecracker wizard from Valencia put on a lavish and noisy display, but one of a salvo of giant rockets unfortunately lodged in the top of a royal palm tree near the house and set the treetop on fire. Attempts by some of the guests to climb a sixty-foot ladder and attack the blaze with a garden hose were perilously abortive, so the fire department was eventually summoned from Malaga.

  The hook and ladder that arrived was straight out of Mack Sennett—and so were the firemen. But they fought the blaze courageously and the tree and the house and the night were saved. The firemen were immediately assimilated by the party, and so were their uniforms and their fire engine, which Antonio, wearing the fire chief's helmet and raincoat, raced around the grounds with the siren wide open.

  After breakfast the guests started to depart but it was not until noon that the last of them had retired. The Churriana sun was up hot by now and Ernest and I had a swim before going to bed.

  "What I enjoyed most about the party," Ernest said as we were going to our rooms, "is that these old friends still care enough to come so far. The thing about old friends now is that there are so few of them."

  The very first mano a mano was scheduled for the fourth day of the feria in Valencia. On the afternoon of the third day of that feria Antonio's friend Juan Luis, whose estate was on the water just outside Valencia, invited Ernest and all his cuadrilla mob for lunch and swimming. The sea had polite little whitecaps and looked civilized, but we discovered when we went in that there was a strong current running away from the beach. I don't recall which girl it was who came swimming in and called to us from the surf; all we heard was "Papa . . ." over the breaking waves, but that was enough.

  Juan Luis got to him first and Ernest put his hand on Juan Luis' shoulder and they came into shore that way with three of us swimming alongside. We stayed in the surf for a few minutes, not getting out before Ernest got to his feet. He sat with his back to the shore, looking out to sea. I could not help but think of the time at Varadero Beach, ten years before, when he had swum through much rougher waters with his pants held high over his head.

  Ernest got to his feet rather shakily and started across the beach to where the main body of the group was camped. I don't think they were aware of what had happened. I looked at Ernest as he approached them. His color was gone and the smile on his face wasn't a smile.

  The following afternoon's mano a mano was brief. A gust of wind caught Dominguin's muleta during a pass, and the bull drove his horn deep into Luis Miguel's groin, cutting through the abdominal muscles and into the peritoneum. It had been a good feria until then, with Antonio giving several brilliant performances, but his rivalry with his brother-in-law was over for the time being. Ernest felt bad that Miguel had been hurt by wind, which Ernest had always said was the bullfighter's worst enemy.

  Then, a few days after Dominguin's cornada, Antonio was gored in the right thigh in a fight at Palma de Mallorca; that really put the quietus on our bullfight plans, and the intricately worked-out itinerary had to be discarded. Ernest's cuadrilla had all gone by now, and he, Bill and I went back to the Churriana house. Ernest spent his mornings making notes for the article which he had contracted to write for Life and working on his Paris sketches.

  On days that we did not feel like working (I was writing television dramatizations of four of Ernest's stories which I was scheduled to produce for CBS during the coming season) we traveled to Cordoba or Gibraltar or the Alhambra in Granada.

  Ernest was not being social now, since he was working, and Bill had cut off all guests; but Mary returned from Malaga one afternoon and said that she had run into a distinguished television commentator who was on a honeymoon with a new wife and that he had asked to meet Ernest, so she had invited them for lunch. Ernest was dismayed at having to face a television pundit, but Mary assured him this commentator understood that the visit would be strictly social.

  For half the lunch it was, but then the commentator, who has a truly noble and honorable profile, began to ask Ernest direct questions about the fights between Antonio and Domin-guin. Although Ernest explained that he didn't like to discuss anything he was going to write about because he didn't enjoy seeing it in print under somebody else's name before he got to it, the nobly-profiled commentator insisted that he knew nothing about bullfighting and was only asking in order to learn and would never violate his host's hospitality. (A few months later the commentator's verbatim account of this luncheon interrogation appeared in an American magazine.)

  The mano a manos were scheduled to resume on August 14th in Malaga, but it seemed impossible that either of the matadors could recover that soon. They did, although their wounds were far from healed. Antonio got out of the hospital on the eleventh, with his wound still discharging, and came down to Churriana on the twelfth to get into shape. Bill's son, Teo, had a baseball bat and Ernest suggested that we teach Antonio, who had never had a bat in his hands, how to hit. I pitched to him with a tennis ball and it was astonishing to see how quickly, with his great co-ordination and reflexes, Antonio was able to smack even my best pitches over the t
ops of the royal palms.

  That night at dinner Ernest and Antonio decided that in repayment for having made a baseball player of Antonio, Antonio would make a matador out of me (he called me "El Pecas," The Freckled One). "Does El Pecas have the necessary reflexes?" he asked Ernest.

  Ernest answered with the "impromptu" throwing-and-catching act (forks, plates, wine glasses, etc.) which was part of our "loosening up" repertoire. That convinced Antonio that my reflexes were all right and he solemnly announced that I would be the sobresaliente at the next scheduled mano a mano in Ciudad Real. We drank down our wine to that and again to Ernest's announcement that he would be my manager.

  Ernest called the following day's mano a mano "one of the very greatest bullfights I have ever seen; maybe the greatest." Antonio was awarded six ears, two tails and two hoofs for his three bulls, and Dominguin garnered four ears, two tails and a hoof for his; it was an afternoon of such competitive artistry, such fierce display of courage that Ernest called it unreal.

  I had thought that all the talk about my going into the bullring in Ciudad Real was a bibulous joke, but when we arrived in Antonio's room before the corrida on August 17th, there were two sword handlers and one of them was for me. Antonio had set out two of his matador suits and my sword handler was standing beside the ivory and black one, ready to fit me into it.

  I would go into the ring as the sobresaliente, the substitute matador in a mano a mano who has to kill the bulls if the two contending bullfighters are injured. Of course I would just be masquerading as the sobresaliente, but Spanish officials take such infractions very seriously and I had been told—whether true or not—that a few years back a pal of the bullfighter Litri had been unmasked and spent a year in a rather depressing dungeon for having impersonated a bullfighter. "The only one we know who got away with it," Ernest told me, "was Luis Miguel. He took his friend Count Teba, nephew of the Duke of Alba, into the ring as a member of his cuadrilla. But that was in France."