Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  Everyone had a fine time dressing me, particularly my manager, Ernest. Instead of the usual pre-bullfight air of heavy solemnity that hangs in the matador's room, there was the light-hearted atmosphere of a fraternity initiation. You cannot have an idea of how complicated the matador's costume is—and how tight. Everything fits like new skin and is tied down so that when you finally stand there, mummified, no part of your costume can possibly flap in the wind, and thus attract the bull's eye during a charge. Frankly, I thought that when the moment came to depart for the ring I would be released from this grandiose joke; so for the time being I happily went along with it.

  "Remember, you must not make the matadors look bad in your first appearance, Pecas," Ernest said. "It would be unfriendly."

  Antonio said, "Only think about how great you will be and our pride and confidence in you."

  When it came time to leave for the ring, everyone left us alone in the room; Antonio went over to a small table where all his religious objects were spread out for him as always, and as he prayed he kissed each one. I stood in a corner, wishing like hell that I had something I could pray over.

  The door opened and Antonio's entire cuadrilla was waiting there in the hall in their costumes. Antonio put on his hat and picked up his ceremonial cape, as I did mine; and I followed him out of the room with difficulty because my pants were so tight I couldn't bend my legs at the knees.

  My memory of getting to the ring that day is pretty fuzzy, although I do remember almost falling down the stairs going down to the lobby (try walking stiff-legged down steep old stairs sometime in new shoes). But Ernest noted this historic event in his account of it:

  "When they came downstairs Antonio had his same dark, reserved, concentrated before the bullfight face with the eyes hooded against all outsiders. Hotch's freckled face and second baseman's profile was that of a seasoned novillero facing his first great chance. He nodded at me somberly. No one could tell he was not a bullfighter and Antonio's suit fitted him perfectly."

  We passed through a crowd that had been waiting in the lobby and through a denser crowd that waited outside around Antonio's cuadrilla wagon. It was a big custom-made Chevrolet with a panel-truck chassis to withstand the beating from the bad Spanish roads. My manager got in with me and sat beside me.

  "Papa," I said, "what the devil do I do? I've got to walk in the paseo, don't I? Is this a big ring?"

  "Holds eight thousand. One of the biggest outside Madrid." A vision of walking clear across a big ring before eight thousand people alongside the world's two greatest matadors, followed by our cuadrilla and picadors on their horses, passed before my eyes and I dizzied a little. "There are just three things the matador must do," Ernest said. "Remember them and you'll be all right. First, always look tragic, like you're on the verge of tears."

  "Have you taken a good look at me?"

  "Fine. Now, second, when you get to the ring, never lean on anything; it doesn't look good for the suit. And third, when the photographers come around to take your picture, put your right leg forward—it's sexier."

  I gave him the look he deserved. He patted my unbent knee. "This is my first time as a matador manager, and I'm a little nervous," he said. "Are you?"

  My nerves got their biggest jolt when I saw the huge posters on the outside of the bull ring. Under ordonez y dominguin, it said sobresaliente: el pecas.

  When we were all assembled under the stands, and I looked over the top of the big wooden gates that would soon swing open to start the paseo, and saw the thousands of Spaniards who jammed the arena, I was suddenly overcome by a frantic desire to escape. But the photographers were now descending on us, so I braced myself and tried to follow Ernest's instructions. Then as we stood there being photographed, a terrible truth dawned on me. I got Ernest to one side.

  "Look at Antonio and Dominguin," I said. "Their pants. Then look at me." Ernest looked. "I am a positive disgrace to the United States of America," I said.

  "Well, how many handkerchiefs did you use?" Ernest asked.

  "What handkerchiefs?"

  "They're using two, I'd say. That's the customary number although I hear Chicuelo II uses four."

  "You mean handkerchiefs in their pants?"

  "Don't tell me you didn't use handkerchiefs?"

  "How the hell would I know about handkerchiefs? I was relying on my manager."

  "But you've been to enough bullfights . . . how did you think they got bulges like that?"

  "The subject never interested me until now."

  The band struck up, the wooden gates swung open, the picadors moved close in on their high, skinny horses, and somebody pointed me in the right direction as the two grooms on their horses started into the ring, followed by Antonio and Dominguin, walking side by side, with El Pecas the customary three steps behind them. All the other men fanned out in back with the mule teams bringing up the rear. We got a big hand. I still couldn't bend my knees, but I watched Antonio and tried to swing my right arm stiffly the way he did. The distance across the ring was easily four miles.

  We stopped in front of the President's box, saluted and bowed our heads, and I followed Antonio into the callejon where Ernest was awaiting me.

  "How did it look?"

  "You had just the right amount of modesty and quiet confidence."

  "I felt like a bull's behind."

  The trumpets sounded and Luis Miguel's first bull came charging in, a great black swirl of hump muscle and horn. Miguelillo, the sword handler, gave me a cape.

  "What do I do now?" I asked Ernest.

  "Hold it at the ready and look intelligent but not too eager."

  "Do I know you?"

  "Not too well. I've seen you fight. You're no pal. I want you to have fun but don't get caught. They don't have habeas corpus in Spanish jails."

  Luis Miguel's cape work was pretty good.

  "Study the bull," Ernest said.

  "He looks all right to me."

  "What's wrong with him?"

  "He's got awfully big horns."

  "They all look bigger down here."

  "Aren't they pic-ing him an awful lot?"

  "Yes."

  "Too much?"

  "They're cutting him down for Miguel because he hurt his leg in Malaga."

  "I thought he was limping a little."

  "How are your legs?"

  "Awful but under control."

  Dominguin cut one ear for his performance, but Antonio was fabulous with a splendid bull with whom he danced exuberantly; "dance" is the only word for the ballet-faena he performed with his mesmerized beast who responded to his every lead as if this were a pas de deux they had rehearsed all morning; Antonio was awarded both ears and the tail and he demanded a tour of the ring for the courageous bull.

  As Antonio passed by us during his own triumphant circuit of the ring he shouted to Ernest, "Tell Pecas he's looking great. Have you told him how to kill yet?"

  "Not yet."

  "Tell him."

  "Don't look at the horn," Ernest told me. "Sight for where the sword is going in. Keep the left hand low and swing it to your right as you go in."

  "What do I do then?"

  "You'll go up in the air and we'll all catch you when you land."

  Luis Miguel did badly with his last bull, but Antonio really turned it on with his, and the President gave him the ears, tail and a hoof, which is the ultimate that can be awarded, but if the crowd had had its way they would have quartered the bull and given him the whole thing. He beckoned to me. "He wants you to take the tour with him," Ernest said, giving me a helpful nudge.

  Antonio waited until I trotted over to him. An avalanche of flowers, sandwiches, cigars, candy, hats, wineskins, shoes, fans, cigarettes, handbags, sunglasses, mantillas, boots, fountain pens, money, pipes, belts, and tiaras was cascading down on us. "Keep handbags and slippers. Let my men pick up everything else," Antonio said.

  So around we went, the crowd wildly showering us, and by the time we had completed our sec
ond tour of the ring I was pretty heavy with handbags and an assortment of ladies' shoes.

  Suddenly Antonio was swept up on the shoulders of a large group of men who intended to parade him across the ring and through the town all the way back to his hotel.

  I looked around. All the cuadrilla had left. I was alone in the center of the ring. I suddenly discovered how fast you could move in that tight-legged suit and I reached the Chevrolet just as they were pulling out.

  When we were safely back in Antonio's room and getting peeled out of our suits, I found out about the handbags and shoes as a succession of beauties showed up to reclaim them. Wine and food came up from the kitchen and soon the room was packed with jubilant people. My only bad moment came when one of the more spectacular ladies, who had come for her alligator bag, asked about my scars and I didn't have even the remains of an appendectomy to show her.

  Four days later, in Bilbao, the mano a manos ended abruptly and for keeps when the mounting pressure from Antonio finally caught up with Dominguin. It happened while Dominguin was placing the bull for the picador. It is one of the most elementary moves in bullfighting and every matador does it thousands of times. But Dominguin inexplicably moved into the bull instead of away and its horn caught him in the groin and slammed him against the horse. The picador drove his lance into the bull as Dominguin was tossed into the air, but the bull disregarded the lance and caught Dominguin again as he came down and chopped at him several times on the sand before they made the quite and ran him to the infirmary.

  Ernest went to see him in the hospital that evening. Dominguin was suffering very much from the penetration of the horn, which had ripped up into his abdomen and very nearly taken his life. Ernest talked to him for a short while in a low voice, and Dominguin nodded and smiled a little.

  Afterward, walking back to the hotel, Ernest said, "He's a brave man and a beautiful matador. Why the hell do the good and brave have to die before everyone else?" He did not mean die as in death, for Dominguin was going to survive, but what was important to his living had died. I remembered Ernest once telling me, "The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do—and what you do makes you what you are—is to back up into the grave."

  A heavy mist was falling and the Bilbao streets glistened with refracted light. I looked at Ernest, who was pulling up the collar of his trench coat against the rain, and I felt the eerie sensation of walking down a sidewalk in Lausanne alongside Lieutenant Henry, who had just left his dead Catherine in the hospital.

  The following day we drove from Bilbao to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a town on the Gulf of Vizcaya, a few miles beyond the Spanish border and close to Dax, where Antonio was to perform before Gallic aficionados. The new Lancia, which was the first Ernest had actually owned, took the bad Spanish roads in beautiful stride and Ernest was very proud of it.

  We stayed outside of town in a gracious, flowered, commodious hotel, the Chantaco, where we ate wonderful Basque food, and afterward we went into Saint-Jean-de-Luz to the Bar Basque for coffee and cordials. (Mary and Annie had gone back to Malaga from Bilbao, so we were just Bill, Ernest, myself and Honor, who, for some time now, had been functioning as Ernest's secretary, filing the notes, clippings and photographs that Ernest needed for the Life article.) Ernest raised his glass.

  "I have a dichohe said. "The cuadrilla will miss El Pecas."

  "El Pecas will miss the cuadrilla," I answered. "I certainly will."

  After Antonio's corrida the following afternoon, a rather lackluster performance, Bill drove me to Biarritz, where I boarded the rapide for Paris. The following day, I received a cable from Madrid telling me to disregard the newspaper accounts, and that the Lancia was wrecked but they were okay. It was signed: Love Papa. I telephoned the Suecia, where I knew they would be. Ernest told me that after leaving Biarritz they had stopped for dinner, then set out on the road to Madrid. Bill had fallen asleep at the wheel; the Lancia had left the road at high speed, ripped up several cement roadmarkers, careened across a ditch and a field, but had not turned over; nor did any of them have so much as a scratch.

  "Absolutely can't blame Bill," Ernest said. "He's done all the driving all summer, and damn fine, and I shouldn't have pushed him on this. I should have known it was too late to start out."

  "I guess he feels pretty bad about it." I knew Bill prided himself on his driving.

  "He does now but I'm working on him. He'll be all right. He feels awful about wrecking the Lancia."

  Ernest returned to New York on the Liberte toward the end of October. I had had no news of how the rest of the summer had passed, other than this item which ran in The New York Times:

  hemingway asks thief to return his wallet

  MADRID, Sept. 16 (UPI)—Ernest Hemingway appealed today to the pickpocket who robbed him at a bullfight in Murcia last week to return his wallet even if he keeps the $150 that was in it.

  He said the wallet was a gift from his son Patrick, a professional hunter in the East African colony of Tanganyika.

  "I beg of you to send-back my billfold with the image of St. Christopher in it," Hemingway said in an ad published by the newspaper Pueblo. "As for the Qooo pesetas ($150) it contained, your skill deserves that prize as a reward."

  When I met Ernest at the boat he seemed preoccupied and subdued; one of his preoccupations was with a diamond pin he had bought for Mary at Cartier's in Paris. It was a beautiful pin but he was worried because Mary had really wanted a pair of diamond earrings which he had refused to buy because they were too expensive; this pin was being brought as a peace offering.

  "How did Mary seem to you?" Ernest asked. Mary had left a month earlier and I had seen her briefly in New York on her way to Cuba.

  "Well, fine, but she was pretty upset about the summer."

  He nodded his head slowly. "I know. Neglect. And she has a proper beef, you know. I was just having so damn much fun . . . well, it wasn't organized around her. There were us guys and the road and Antonio's fights and all that, and Miss Mary was mostly parked in various places. Pretty great places, but still and all . . . of course, I invited her on almost all of the trips but she said they were too tiring or too dull. She didn't want to go and she didn't want me to go."

  "Well, summers fade away pretty fast."

  "Yes, but I've invited Antonio and Carmen to Cuba and then to drive with us to Ketchum and stay there for a while, and Mary just sees it as a lot of work."

  "Which it will be."

  "But a lot of fun, too."

  "Fill me in on what happened after I left," I said.

  "Sorry to say, it wasn't the September and October we had planned on. Antonio wound up spending a month in jail for using picadors who had been suspended—so there were no bullfights. And just before that my Hong Kong security pocket was pierced for the first time—lost everything."

  "I read about it."

  "Those events certainly cooled off the summer, which had the ultimate chill put on it by a letter I received from my brother Leicester. It seems he has written a book about me that, among other things, contains some of my letters and he wanted permission to print them. I wrote him my general attitude toward books about people who are still alive, and especially one member of a family writing about that family, especially one as vulnerable as ours where my mother was a bitch and my father a suicide. It always seemed better to me to skip the whole thing and try for a better record, and I am damned if I will permit the Baron to write about it and dredge up all the trouble I've ever been in as well, just to make money. It might be better to buy the whole thing from him and get a release, but as I explained to him, no Hemingstein has ever yet paid for anything he could prevent with his own two hands."

  Ernest stayed in New York for a few days to conduct some business but the air of preoccupation clung to him. The summer was over. Not just another summer, but the summer, the last good time of a li
fe of good times. Unfortunately, some of what had happened that summer in the disguise of levity was to come back to haunt Ernest. The tide that he had always easily swum against was destined to push him out to the open sea. But this had been the best summer of his life, he had said, and no one could take that away from him.

  As I drove him out to the airport he continued to worry about Mary. "Do you think Miss Mary will like the pin?" he asked.

  "Sure she will. It's a lovely pin."

  "I hope so."

  "Sure she will."

  "I guess it wasn't much fun for her. I just wish she wouldn't take it out on poor Bill."

  "She had some fun, quite a lot. She'll be all right."

  "She hasn't written since she left. And I've got Antonio coming."

  "Don't worry, Papa. Please don't worry. Everything will be all right."

  "I just hope she likes the pin."

  Part Four

  Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name

  thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it

  is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada

  and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and

  nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada;

  pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing,

  nothing is with thee.

  a clean, well-lighted place

  Chapter Thirteen

  Havana ♦ 1960

  All of San Francisco de Paula was at the airport with banners to greet Ernest. He was well loved by his little village whose residents treated him like a benign feudal lord. He was generous and inconspicuous in his charities and he enjoyed occasional evenings in the village bar, talking with the men whom he had known for more than two decades.