Papa Hemingway (19 page)

We went across the street to Sonny's Bar, which Ernest had often talked about as one of his favorite places in the days when he and Charley MacArthur and Fitzgerald and the others were first discovering the joys of the Riviera. In those days Sonny's Bar handled Ernest's mail, extended him credit, served him his favorite dishes at his favorite corner table, and covered for him with girls and creditors. It had a proper, leather air about it, with a mahogany bar and padded-leather bar stools and chairs. This was early season for Biarritz and there were only a few customers. The barman handed Ernest a letter which had been there for three years.

After Sonny's Bar we drove to the contiguous town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where we visited another of Ernest's old haunts, the Bar Basque. We had a drink, standing up at the bar. Beside the bar were tables and chairs. Ernest stood with his back to the bar, sipping his drink and studying one of the empty tables.

"This is where I was standing," he said, "the day Charley Wertenbaker came in with the most beautiful girl I ever laid eyes on. They sat here,, at this table. Bar was crowded, so don't think Charley saw me; anyway, he was too concentrated on girl. Was not eavesdropping but Charley began to raise his voice and I heard him say, 'I'll kill her,' so naturally from then on I strained my ears to listen. Girl said, 'Does it do any good to say I'm sorry?' Charley said, 'No, did no damn good.' Girl said she loved him very much. Charley said, 'If only it was a man,' and that let me in on the whole thing."

" 'The Sea Change,'" I said, "so this is where it happened." It had never occurred to me that the short story was anything but fiction.

"In the story I called the man Phil, but it was Charley and the girl was some beauty."

"Did he really tell her to go?"

"Actually he begged her not to, but the way it is in the story it amounts to the same thing."

"And she said she loved him and would come back to him?"

"Yes."

"Did it happen that way? Did Charley take her back?"

"I don't know. But one afternoon I saw Charley's girl walking along the beach with the girl she had gone to. Had expected other girl to be a typical bull-dyke: pompadour hair, tweed suit, low oxfords. But she was as pretty as Charley's girl. Those two beauties walking hand in hand on the beach."

In San Sebastian, our first stop in Spain on our way to Madrid, Ernest hunted for a certain cafe, the name of which he had forgotten (this was one of the few times that I had known Ernest's memory to fail him on such a detail; he kept no notebooks or journals but his phenomenal recall kept places, names, dates, events, colors, clothes, smells and who won the 1925 six-day bicycle race at the Hippodrome, on orderly file).

Ernest was anxious to find the cafe because it was the only way he knew to get in touch with his old friend Juanito Quin-tana, whom he describes in
Death in the Afternoon
as one of the most knowledgeable
aficionados
in Spain. Quintana had been an impresario of means in Pamplona before the Civil War, when he ran the bull ring and owned a hotel. But Franco had stripped him of both and left him to scrounge, which is a very overcrowded occupation in Spain. As an old comrade-inarms, Ernest was loyal to him and sent him a monthly stipend, as he did to several other of his old Spanish friends.

We finally found Juanito, a short smiling man in need of dentistry, who had an overruddy complexion; he quickly packed a few belongings and joined us for the trip south.

In the northern town of Burgos, Ernest asked Adamo to stop at the cathedral, which is one of the grandest in Spain. "Wherever you see a big cathedral," Ernest said, "it's grain country." With my help Ernest pulled himself torturously from the car and went slowly up the cathedral steps, bringing both feet together on each step. He touched the holy water and crossed the murky deserted interior, his moccasins barely audible on the stone floor. He stood for a moment at a side altar, looking up at the candles, his gray trench coat, white whiskers and steel-rimmed glasses giving him a monkish quality. Then, holding tightly, he lowered his knees onto a prayer bench and bent his forehead onto his overlapped hands. He stayed that way for several minutes.

Afterward, descending the cathedral steps, he said, "Sometimes I wish I were a better Catholic."

We spent the night in an
albergue
near Logrono on the Madrid road. When Ernest and I entered the bar of the
albergue
, which was crowded, we could hear an Englishman saying to his two companions, "You know, this is where
Fiesta
took place [the title for
The Sun Also Rises
when it was published in England]. Wouldn't it be a scream if old Hemingway was in here having a drink?"

Ernest walked up to the men and said, "What will you have, gentlemen?" I think he enjoyed that moment more than anything else on the trip, and he referred to it many times over the following years. While Ernest was talking to the men, a tall, fleshy Pinocchio-nosed man approached me and introduced himself as John Kobler of Westport, Connecticut. He said he had been stranded at the motel for two days because mosquitoes had clogged the radiator of his Buick, which was in the local garage for declogging. He asked whether I thought it would be all right for him to take pictures of Mr. Hemingway with his movie camera. I told him to ask Ernest.

Kobler went over and broke in on Ernest's conversation, which is a maneuver Ernest liked about as much as breaking into his house. Kobler started to ask him about posing for his camera, but Ernest interrupted to ask Kobler where he got the jacket he was wearing, saying he thought it was the most sensational jacket he ever saw; and then he checked out the Englishmen's opinions on its cut and color, wanted to know if it shed, and on and on; Kobler preened and answered dutifully and felt very proud of his jacket. (This form of relentless attack upon the plumage of an interloper was one of Ernest's commonly used weapons. I especially recall such an assault at the Ritz upon a pair of chandelier earrings worn by an overbearing, overbreasted autograph-seeking matron from Steubenville, Ohio.)

"Jacket made by Johnson and Johnson from reject Band-aids," Ernest confided to me when he saw Kobler later that evening in the dining room. "What's he doing here?"

"Mosquitoes have clogged his Buick."

"It figures," Ernest said.

As we approached Madrid, Ernest pointed out the mountain top where Pablo's band had hid out in
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
"We'll drive up there one day with Mary," he said, "and have a picnic by the bridge."

Ernest checked into the Palace Hotel (le Capitaine Cook and the other comestibles filled a closet), which, like all Madrid, was very crowded because the Festival of San Isidro, Spain's num-ber-one bullfight spectacle, was to start the following day, May 15th. Mary was driving up from Seville with Rupert Belville, who was an old and valued English friend, although he had been a pilot on Franco's side during the Civil War.

We went to have a drink at the Cerveceria Alemana on the Plaza Santa Ana, a favorite hangout for matadors and bullfight impresarios, and many of the men came over to greet Ernest. We drank beer and ate delicious shrimp and
langosta.
Then Ernest ordered an absinthe; his eyes were yellow again. He began to talk about Madrid events during the Civil War, and I asked him how much of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
had come from actual events.

"Not as much as you may think. There was the bridge that was blown, and I had seen that. The blowing of the train as described in the book was also a true event. And I used to slip through the enemy lines into Segovia, where I learned a lot about Fascist activity which I carried back to our command. But the people and events were invented out of my total knowledge, feeling and hopes. When Pilar remembers back to what happened in their village when the Fascists came, that's Ronda, and the details of the town are exact.

"All good books have one thing in common—they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you've read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappi-ness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you're a writer. That's what I was trying to give them in
For Whom the Bell Tolls.

"Toward the end of the war, when things were going very badly for the Loyalists, I took time out to return to the States to try to raise money; when I got back to the front I sought out the Polish general who was then in command, a man I respected very much, and asked him how things were going.

" 'And how is Mrs. Hemingway?' was his answer.

"A French colonel came running into the command post. We've got to do something!' he shouted. 'We've got to do something! The Fascist planes are coming! Tell me what my men and I can do!'

"The general said, 'You can go out and build a very high tower that you can climb up so you can see them better.'

"It was along about this time that Dos Passos finally came to Spain. He had been in Paris the whole time, writing me notes heatedly in favor of our cause, but now he announced he was actually coming down to join us and we eagerly awaited his arrival because we were all starving and he had been instructed to bring food. He arrived with four chocolate bars and four oranges. We damn near killed him.

"He had left his wife in Paris and on arrival he gave Sidney Franklin a telegram for her and asked him to take it to censorship. The censor called me. Wanted to know if the message was in code. I asked him to read it. It was, 'Baby, see you soon.' I said to the censor, 'No, it isn't code. It just means Mr. Dos Passos won't be with us very long.'

"Dos spent his whole time in Madrid looking for his translator. We all knew he had been shot but no one had the heart to tell Dos, who thought the translator was in prison and went all around checking lists. Finally, I told him. I had never met the translator, nor had I seen him shot, but that was the word on him; well, Dos turned on me like I had shot him myself. I couldn't believe the change in the man from the last time I had seen him in Paris! The very first time his hotel was bombed, Dos packed up and hurried back to France. Of course, we were all damned scared during the war, but not over a chicken-shit thing like a few bombs on the hotel. Only a couple of rooms ever got hit anyway. I finally figured it out that Dos's problem was that he had come into some money, and for the first time his body had become valuable. Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth: Hemingstein's Law on the Dynamics of Dying."

We both ordered absinthe, and Ernest continued to talk about the Civil War: "General Modesto was in love with Miss Martha, made three passes at her in my presence, so I invited him to step into the men's can. 'All right, General,' I said, 'let's have it out. We hold handkerchiefs in our mouths and keep firing till one of us drops.' We got out our handkerchiefs and our guns, but a pal of mine came in and talked me out of it because money was scarce and our side could not afford a monument, which all Spanish generals get automatically."

Still talking about Martha, Ernest was reminded of the night they were asleep in bed when an earthquake struck and the bed was thrown around. He recalled that Martha gave him a shove and said, "Ernest, will you please stop tossing!" At that moment, Ernest said, a pitcher slid off the table and broke and the roof caved in on them and he was finally absolved.

"Martha was the most ambitious woman who ever lived, was always off to cover a tax-free war for
Collier's.
She liked everything sanitary. Her father was a doctor, so she made our house look as much like a hospital as possible. No animal heads, no matter how beautiful, because they were unsanitary. Her
Time
friends all came down to the
finca,
dressed in pressed flannels, to play impeccable, pitty-pat tennis. My pelota pals also played, but they played rough. They would jump into the pool all sweated and without showering because they said only fairies took showers. They would often show up with a wagon full of ice blocks and dump them into the pool and then play water polo. That began the friction between Miss Martha and me— my pelota pals dirtying up her
Time
pals.

"God knows I do not have a definitive reading on womenies, but I do know that little things count much more than big things. And it's all a question of balance. Too little sex, neglected; too much, you're oversexed; Christ, man should get changing readings on a woman's mood like he gets the
cote jaunes
before each race. But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone."

We left the cafe and went to look for Mary, whom we found waiting at the hotel with Rupert, a tall, well-groomed, ruddy-faced perfectly dictioned constituent of the leisured, nonwork-ing, White's-Clubbed upperest class. Mary and Ernest were very glad to see each other and Ernest hugged her against his stomach bulwark and she kissed his lips through his partially restored beard.

It rained so hard the first day of the
feria
that the bullfights had to be called off. As a substitute we had drinks and
tapas
in the Palace Bar, the nerve center of Madrid social intrigue, where every woman looks like a successful spy.