By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 15

  Entering the bar and getting into conversation, I found there was something strange in the manner of the old friend. Where formerly, and in many places, he had tried to dissuade me from drinking this particular beverage he now urged me to have an absinthe. Just one. Why not have one?

  No, I told him with some dignity. I was not like that now.

  But what about our mutual friend so and so, he asked, mentioning someone we had never been able to agree on. He had always maintained this chap was a charlatan and grafter while I had upheld him as a really noble fellow souled with honor.

  He’s all right.

  He’s a good man, said my old Spanish friend. A good man with great inquietude of spirit.

  By this time I knew there was something very wrong and thought it must be that my old friend was probably meeting someone in that bar that he would rather I did not see him meet; so I said that I must be off. I had tried to purchase a round but it seemed that everything there was paid for not only by my old friend but by a rather seedy looking new friend who had been gored in the neck and whose name I did not catch.

  After three rounds in an uncomfortable atmosphere of mutual esteem and appreciation during which we made several engagements without actually naming a date, I left, very puzzled. I had finally succeeded in paying for a round and I hoped things might be getting back to a normal basis.

  • • •

  Next day I found out what it was all about. It was in the Sunday paper. My old friend had written an article entitled Mister Hemingway, Friend of Spain. Now when you become known as A Friend of France it usually means that you are dead, the French would not commit themselves that far if you were alive, and that you have either spent much money for France, obtained much money for France, or simply sucked after certain people long enough to get the Legion of Honor. In the last case they call you a Friend of France in much smaller type.

  A Friend of Soviet Russia is very different. It usually refers to a person who is getting, or expects to get, considerable from Soviet Russia. It may only be one who hopes to get much in or for his own country by the implanting of the system of Soviet Russia. But it is nothing like a Friend of France. A Friend of France is one who has given his all; or as near his all as he could be persuaded to give. They once said, or rather told us, every man has two countries; his own and France. That might be amended now to: every man has three countries—his own, France and the poor house.

  Now I do not know just what constitutes a Friend of Spain, but when they call you that it is time to lay off. Spain is a big country and it is now inhabited by too many politicians for any man to be a friend to all of it with impunity. The spectacle of its governing is at present more comic than tragic; but the tragedy is very close.

  • • •

  The country seems much more prosperous. There is much more money being spent. People are travelling who never travelled before; people go to bull fights who could not afford it before, and many people are swimming who never took a bath before. A good deal more money is coming in in taxes than the royal establishment ever received, but now that money goes to the innumerable functionaries of the republic. These spread all over the country and while the peasants are as bad off as ever, the middle class is being taxed more than ever, and the rich certainly will be wiped out, although there is no sign of it yet; a great new bureaucracy is having more money than it ever had before and going in for much comfort, many vacations and considerable style. Politics is still a lucrative profession and those in the factions on the outside promise to pay their debts as soon as they get their turn in power. So that a good business man might vote a man in as head of the government in order that he might pay his wine bill.

  In Santander, one of the most unattractive towns in Spain, dusty, crowded, with a bastard Basque architecture alternating with the best of the late Brighton school, but popularized as a watering place by the King going there for the summer because it was considered safer than San Sebastian, there was not a room to stay the night in any sort of a hotel.

  San Sebastian, one of the very pleasantest places of Europe, was as crowded but with very different people. The crowd at Santander had gone there because the King had gone there. They were going to go to the seashore because, now, they had the money to. They did not seem to know whether they were having any fun or not. But they had been to the seashore. The people of San Sebastian knew what they had come for and were having a very good time.

  • • •

  Bull fighting, of course, has been in a bad way for a couple of hundred years and the first Sunday story that any newly arrived correspondent sends back to his paper from Madrid has always been that one about Bullfights on Wane as Football Sweeps Spain. This was first sent, I believe, by Washington Irving who was then writing for the, then, New York Sun under the pen name of Irvin S. Washington. It was a story I always liked to write myself because you finally got so you could do it quicker than most stories; but no one ever improved on Irvin S. Washington’s original dispatch.

  A sad thing happened, tho, in connection with this story. A correspondent for the, then, New York Times on arriving in Madrid cabled his story instead of sending it by mail. The Times sent him into Coventry, I believe, and refused to admit receiving any communications from him over a period of some years. I used to meet him wandering around and ask him how things were going.

  “I simply don’t hear from them,” he said desperately.

  “Do you write them?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you cable them?”

  “As often as I dare.”

  “Do you send them registered letters?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said, brightening.

  “Try it,” I urged.

  Later I promised to look them up if I ever got to New York and see if I could do anything about his strange plight. But when I got to New York they had moved. I tried to trace them, but it was no good. Years later I heard that the poor fellow was still in Madrid.

  • • •

  Bull fighting, as usual, is in bad shape.

  Marcial Lelanda has two children, over a million pesetas, a good bull ranch—rather a good big ranch for raising bulls; and a firm and sound resolution to take no more chances with horned animals. He knows enough so that he can appear in the ring with them and dispatch them without risk; but it is no fun for the spectators either.

  Domingo Ortega, fighting nearly a hundred fights a year for two seasons has, very obviously, learned how to fight bulls. He fights every one that comes into the ring in exactly the same way, punishing them all in the same way; dominating them; showing his domination by stroking the horn; and killing them quickly and trickily. If you see him once you know how he will be a hundred times.

  He is desperately monotonous yet he does something, that is he dominates every bull that comes out; while the trashy lot of opposition he usually has need luck to do anything. He was gored, once, in September and so lost the chance of beating Belmonte’s record of 112 fights in a season. He will fight around ninety.

  Armillita Chico, a young, slim, brown, chinless Mexican with legs that hang from under his shoulders, a handful of crooked teeth, wonderful wrists, and great intelligence and knowledge of bulls is many times a better matador than Ortega, but is held back by his negative personality in the ring. Armillita gets everything out of a bull that bull will give. Ortega makes the same bull conform, and conform quickly, to his own limitations. But the public goes crazy about Ortega’s theater, his attitudes, his false tragedy; while Armillita’s cold intelligence, his classic perfection and his superlative skill, which seems to eliminate danger, does not stay in their memories. But his merit is being realized and he will fight more fights in Spain this year than any other Mexican has ever fought except the great Gaona.

  Victoriano de la Serna after a bad season last year and less than twenty fights, has blossomed out again this season as a phenomenon. He has now completed his medical studies and taken his degree, and h
is enemies claim that his bursts of extraordinary courage originate in a hypodermic syringe and that if he does not care to fight he knows the secret of producing a high fever and frothing at the mouth. This is nothing but scandal.

  He is a strange case. He is not a coward but in the three times I saw him this September he did all the things that a bull fighter usually does only when unable to control himself through fear. He did them cynically, perfectly cool and unworried, to avoid risk and to deliberately insult the public. In the ring he has an overwhelming conceit that is pathological.

  His style with the cape is slow, delicate, but, to me, unsound. He makes his passes with the cape by turning his body while keeping his arms out rather than keeping his body still and moving the arms ahead of the bull. It is a way of using the cape as though it were the muleta; and it is a form of using one of the trick passes perfected by Nicanor Villalta. But he does it very gracefully and well.

  With the muleta he is more or less at the mercy of the bull. With a bull that charges and re-charges on a straight line he could probably do a better faena than anyone now in the ring. He is very intelligent, but he does not dominate. He is an unsound, enigmatic, interesting, and highly irritating performer.

  By irritating I mean this: At Salamanca he was getting fourteen thousand pesetas a fight. That is twice the amount some of the other matadors were getting. He was paid this because they knew he could do twice as much if he drew a good bull. His first bull was not much but he worked him as well as he could and the public were all with him. His second bull was perfect for the muleta and La Serna made four excellent passes. As he drew away from the bull to rest him looking up into the stands, putting his hand proudly to his chest to indicate “Look at me. The great Victoriano de la Serna!” some spectator, not impressed, whistled. La Serna looked up where the whistle had come from as though to say “All right. I’ll show you.” Then, with no more passes, no faena, doing nothing he had been paid for, he ran in on the bull and stabbed him in the lungs. The bull choked to death, vomiting his blood.

  The next day the public treated him very severely but applauded the little good work he did. La Serna left the ring wrapped in his cape under the jeers of the spectators; then stooped, took off his fighting shoes, and walked in his stocking feet to his motor car. At the car he knocked the shoes together to get the dust off them and then dropped them delicately to the ground.

  “I don’t want even the dust of Salamanca,” he said.

  Now this superb gesture was first attributed to Saint Teresa on leaving Avila after disappointments there, later to various bullfighters on leaving Mexico. For Victoriano to employ it, merely because he had cheated the public, showed he was a well-read young fellow. But it did not endear him to the public of Salamanca, even to your correspondent who had also paid his money and traveled some distance to see the young doctor perform.

  • • •

  Of the new fighters, the youngest brother of Gitanillo de Triano, who was killed in Madrid two years ago, is a good looking gypsy with a beautiful style with cape and muleta. But he knows very little about bulls and is already having great trouble dominating his fear. Fernando Dominguez is very good with the muleta but is without personality and is a pitiful killer. Maravilla is ill, gored nearly every time he fights, and is only a shell of himself. Corrochano had one excellent fight in Madrid and has done nothing in the provinces. Chiquito de la Audiencia seems to have lost his nerve.

  The annual Messiah appeared in the person of Felix Colomo, a delivery boy at the pelota court, who made two sensational fights in Madrid and received a bad horn wound. Out of the hospital, he fought in Huesca and was very bad, in Gijon and was good; then went back into the hospital with a terrific wound received at La Coruña. He is managed by Torquito, an exmatador from Bilbao, who will probably have enough sense not to fight him again this season no matter how hungry both may be.

  Florentino Ballesteros, son of the matador of the same name killed in the Madrid ring toward the end of the war, seems to be a very competent, workmanlike fighter, skillful, without genius, but an excellent killer. He killed seven bulls in the little ring of Vista Alegre just outside of Madrid in his farewell performance before becoming a full matador, and bored the public with the dullness of his excellence.

  Not seeing any fights until the last of August, I cannot report on how the bulls were in early and mid-season but in September the Salamanca bulls were uniformly poor, colorless, without force, bravery or style. Esteban Gonzales sent a splendid lot of bulls to Madrid from Utrera outside of Sevilla, and Miura’s sent a novillada the last of September that was braver, bigger and better armed than all the corridas we had seen until then.

  • • •

  The old cafe Fornos is gone, torn down to put up an office building, and the former inmates can be found at the Regina next door. There is a new cafe called the Aquarium which looks like the last phase of Montparnasse except that it is crowded. Out on the Manzanares where we all used to go to swim and cook paellas along the Pardo road they have damned the river and built an artificial beach with very modern bathing installation, real sand, a big lagoon and very cold and, remarkably, clean water. There were a lot of small fish swimming around in it; always a good sign in a public bathing place, and it was really not a bad place to swim. Anyone able to swim across the river and back, possibly two hundred yards, was looked on by the non-swimming bathers with the awe we used to feel for Ederle when taking a good look at the channel from the breakwater at Boulogne; and a native swimmer out of his depth without water-wings was a source of inquietude to all the more serious minded. But the Madrileños whose only exercise used to be walking to the cafe are all going in for sports, for picnics in the country and for walking trips in the Sierras. The characteristic shape of the girls is changing. They seem to be taller and not so far around. Exercise and the example of the American cinema, possibly, is responsible. And what else do you want to know?

  Well, we have an ambassador from whom the Spaniards have learned that there are at least two kinds of American newspapermen who can become ambassadors. Their previous experience had been with Alexander Moore. Sometimes it makes you wonder, too, why aside from the desire to honor him, President Roosevelt should send such a very able newspaperman, and such a good Democrat, so far away from the scene of hostilities. Perhaps Mr. Bowers really wanted to be an ambassador. I never asked him.

  A Paris Letter

  Esquire • FEBRUARY, 1934

  THIS time last year we were driving home from Cooke City, Montana, in a blizzard. The boys who had tried to drag Bull-Neck Moose-Face, the truck driver, to death the night of the Old Timers’ Fish Fry because he was alleged to have hit a lady with a poker, were still in jail. The big trout had dropped back down the river into the deep pools of the canyon. The deer had come down from the high country and had gone down the river to their winter range and the elk had gone into the Park.

  We had run into two other outfits when we were hunting sheep up Pilot Creek and lost a shot at two very big rams because some other hunters had spooked them. We felt the country was getting a little crowded. Yet three times I had ridden the twenty-five miles of trail from the ranch up to the camp on Timber Creek and not seen a living soul.

  The fourth time, coming back on the road from Crandall, I saw some hunters camped down the river. They waved and I waved back but it was too far away to recognize them. A little further along the road I saw a grouse in some willows. Old Bess, the horse, saw it too and started to tremble. She kept on trembling and breathing hard through her nose while I got down and, holding the reins, shot the grouse. If I would have let go of the reins she would have left the country. But with them held all she did was give a big jerk with her head when the pistol went off, then stopped trembling when she saw me put the pistol away in the holster. I put the grouse in the saddle pocket and mounted.

  We kept moving along and then, coming toward us, right beside the road, at a trot in an open meadow was a moose. It was a bull with a go
od head and he stopped still when he saw us. He wasn’t thirty yards away and he shone black, looked very big, and I could see his bell clearly, and his horns were the color of black walnut meats. He seemed to look at Bess instead of at me. I got down easy and pulled the rifle out of the saddle bucket as I swung down. He stood there looking at us with Bess trembling and blowing.

  I looked his head over very carefully. It was a nice head but it was nothing to kill him for. He had plenty of meat and no one would eat moose meat when there is such a thing as elk. I put the rifle back in the saddle bucket and swung onto old Bess. All this time he stood there looking.

  “Cut it out,” I said to Bess. “It’s all over. I’m not going to kill him.”

  He let us ride about ten yards closer before he turned and trotted off and went into a patch of quakers. They have a beautiful motion when they trot. Down the trail about a mile and a half I rode onto two hunters. It was Bill Sidley with Frank Colp. Frank had a buckskin shirt on like an Indian. They’d been trailing that moose all day. He’d travelled, they said.

  “He’s right ahead,” I told them. “I tried to herd him back to you.”

  “What sort of head has he?”

  “He’s got a good head.” And I told them what it was like.