Papa Hemingway (20 page)

We saw several good bullfights (in Ernest's judgment) on the succeeding days, but most of the afternoons were cloudy and windy and Ernest was unhappy about this aspect of the performances. "Sun is the best bullfighter," he said. "When the day is overcast it is like a stage show without lights. The matador's worst enemy is wind." He was delighted with the performance of a short, very courageous matador named Chicuelo II ("although it is no longer stylish to tap the bull on the nose to start him"), and had great admiration for the way a matador named Cortega killed. "He goes in cleanly over the horns, holding back nothing. But he has been gored so often he is nothing but steel and nylon inside."

Ernest was still suffering from his injuries, and although he had stopped complaining, I could tell he was in considerable pain. He finally went to see Dr. Madinoveitia, an old friend and one of Madrid's leading practitioners, who told him, "You should have died immediately after the airplane accidents. Since you did not, you should have died when you got those brush-fire burns. You also should have died in Venice. However, since you are still alive, you won't die any more if you will be a good fellow and do as I tell you." He put Ernest on a strict diet and cut him down to two drinks a day and two glasses of wine per meal.

On the way back from the doctor's, an overpoweringly putrid smell suddenly invaded the car; Ernest identified it as the smell of the Madrid slaughterhouse. "This is where the old women come early in the morning to drink the supposedly nutritious blood of the freshly killed cattle. Many a morning I'd get up at dawn and come down here to watch the
novilleros,
and sometimes even the matadors themselves, coming in to practice killing, and there would be the old women standing in line for the blood. Practice-killing in the slaughterhouse was prohibited by law, then as now, but if you were friends with the slaughterhouse foreman, he would slip you in with your killing sword hidden under your coat and you could practice sighting and coming in over the horns to find the target in back of the neck, which is the size of a quarter. There is no way to practice killing except in the slaughterhouse. No one can afford to buy animals just to kill them, and although you can practice the cape and the
muleta
with dummy horns on wheels or at
tientas,
and even practice placing the
banderillas,
there is no way to simulate killing."

Ernest said that by watching the matadors in the slaughterhouse, he really learned about killing, so that when he wrote about it in "The Undefeated," he wrote it for keeps. And, incidental to that, he learned about the old women, whom he put into
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Then Ernest reminded me of an account in
Death in the Afternoon
of a gypsy brother and sister who avenged the death of their older brother who had been gored by a bull that toured the
capeas.
They went to the slaughterhouse on the morning the bull was to be slaughtered for beef, and got permission to kill him by gouging out his eyes, spitting in the sockets, and severing his spinal marrow. They then cut off his testicles, which they roasted over a fire they made in the street opposite the slaughterhouse, and ate them. Ernest said he had been there the morning it happened. It happened in Madrid but Ernest changed it to Valencia. "Sometime read about the old women in
For Whom the Bell Tolls,"
Ernest said. "Many, many cold mornings went into that one paragraph."

For Whom the Bell Tolls
had never been published in Spain but copies were bootlegged in English, and a British Embassy friend of Rupert's lent me his. I thought I knew the book well, but I could not recall "the blood-drinking old women of the Madrid slaughterhouse. They were there, all right. Pilar says she can smell death, and Robert Jordan disputes her: death has no smell, he says; fear maybe, but not death. If death has an odor, what is it?

Pilar describes the smell of death: first, it is the smell that comes when on a ship there is a storm and the portholes are closed up. She tells him to put his nose against the brass handle of a porthole on a rolling ship that has made him faint and hollow in the stomach, and that is a part of that smell. The next part of the smell she says he will find at the Puente de Toledo early in the morning; she tells him to stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the slaughtered beasts. When one of these old women comes out of the
matadero
, Pilar tells him, holding her shawl around her, her face gray, her eyes hollow, the whiskers of age on her chin sprouting from the waxen white of her face as sprouts grow from bean seeds, pale sprouts in the death of her face; then he must put his arms around her, and hold her against him and kiss her on the mouth and he will have the second part of the odor of death.

After his visit to the doctor, Ernest ate sparingly, rested more, and talked about reducing his drinking. He would invariably get into bed after the afternoon
corrida
and stay there, reading, until nine or ten o'clock, when he'd get up to dress for dinner. Some nights he did not get up at all and ordered dinner in his room, eating it off a bed tray. He resumed keeping urine specimens in drinking glasses in the bathroom, and occasionally a sample was dispatched to Dr. Madinoveitia.

Ernest was a prodigious reader and his bed table at the Palace, like his bed tables everywhere, was piled high with a wide assortment of reading matter. To approach a magazine stand with him was a unique experience. He would carefully go down the lines of magazines on display and choose just about one of everything, except what he called the ladies'-aid magazines:
Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal
, etc. He would cart off twenty or more magazines, but the amazing part of it was that he actually read them through and would discuss their contents. Spanish, French and Italian kiosks were treated with equal patronage. At the
finca
he regularly subscribed to
Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Holiday, Field £s? Stream, Sports Afield, True, Time, Newsweek
and
The Southern Jesuit;
two British publications,
Sport and Country
and
The Field;
a Mexican jai-alai magazine,
Cancha;
and a number of Italian and Spanish weeklies. In addition, Scribner's sent him an unceasing supply of books in response to lists he sent them; and he received a steady flow of unsolicited books from all other publishers who hoped he might say something that could be quoted on a dust jacket.

One evening while Ernest was propped up on his Palace Hotel bed, deeply immersed in a Spanish bullfight magazine, he received an unexpected visit from Luis Miguel Dominguin— at that time Spain's number-one matador. He was a lithe, magnificently handsome man who came from a family of bullfighters; even his beautiful sister Carmen had once performed brilliantly in the ring. Dominguin had not fought for over a year, following a severe stomach
cornada,
but he had recently received highly lucrative offers from South America and was thinking of returning to the bullfight wars. He came to the Palace to ask Ernest to visit his girl, Ava Gardner, who was hospitalized with a very painful gallstone. Ava had appeared in
The Killers,
which Ernest considered his only good movie, and a film which he called
The Snows of Zanuck.

After he had left, Ernest said, "Christ, but Luis looked awful, didn't he? At his peak he's a combination Don Juan and Hamlet, but now looked beat up and drained. Probably logging too much time at Miss Ava's bedside."

Ava was surrounded by hospital nuns when we went to see her. They were fixing her bed, taking her pulse, marking her chart and cleaning her room; she was on the long-distance telephone to Hollywood, talking to the head of a studio. In a commanding voice.

"I don't give a goddamn how many scripts you send. I am not, repeat not,
not, NOT
going to play Ruth Etting!"

Five-second listening pause.

"And you can take that contract and shove it up your heinie!"

A sister smoothed the sheets and pulled them up a bit higher on Ava's shoulders.

"Don't give me that crap about commitment and you'll get. . . and don't interrupt me; it's my call! What in Christ's name are you trying to do to me? Great part? I stand there mouthing words like a goddamn goldfish while you're piping in some goddamn dubbed voice!"

A sister plumped up the pillows behind Ava's back, and smiled upon her.

"I said a
dramatic
part, for Christ's sake, and you send me Ruth Etting! It's no wonder I've got this attack. I ought to send you the bill . . . Oh, shut up!"

Ava hung up, swept her hand out to Ernest, smiled beautifully, and said, in a soft, lyric voice, "Hello, Ernest."

"I take it the sisters are not bilingual," Ernest said, taking her hand.

"The sisters are darling," Ava said, patting one and smiling at her, whereupon all of them smiled upon Ava, "and I love this hospital so much I almost don't want to pass this goddamn stone. Sit here on the bed, Papa, and talk to me. I'm absolutely floored you could come." Their work done, the sisters withdrew. Dominguin and I sat on chairs.

"Are you going to live in Spain?" Ernest asked.

"Yes. I sure am. I'm just a country girl at heart. I don't like New York or Paris. I'd love to live here permanently. What have I got to go back to? I have no car, no house, nothing. Sinatra's got nothing either. All I ever got out of any of my marriages was the two years Artie Shaw financed on an analyst's couch."

"Tell you the truth, Daughter, analysts spook me, because I've yet to meet one who had a sense of humor."

"You mean," Ava asked, incredulously, "you've never had an analyst?"

"Sure I have. Portable Corona number three. That's been my analyst. I'll tell you, even though I am not a believer in the Analysis, I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I won't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes, that of giving it."

"That's too deep for me, Papa."

Dominguin told Ernest that he had arranged a
tienta
to see what kind of shape he was in, and invited us to attend. Ava promised she'd make it even if the nuns had to push her there in her hospital bed.

The
tienta,
which is a testing of calves for bravery, was held in a glistening
plazita
(miniature bull ring) on the bull-breeding ranch of Antonio Perez, which was located in the magnificent high country at Quadusaura in the Escorial, in the lee of the Guadaramus. We left Madrid in a procession of three cars, a Vauxhall, Dominguin's custom Cadillac, and Ernest's Lancia, and arrived at the ranch around noon. Dominguin would work the calves with the
muleta,
and they would be slightly pz'c-ed to get their heads down, but there would be no killing. By testing a few of the animals, an owner can determine characteristics of the herds from which they come, enabling him to make decisions on future breeding. There was an undercurrent of excitement not ordinarily associated with a
tienta
, for Dominguin would be testing himself as well as the calves to determine whether he would continue his career.

"These calves," Ernest explained to Ava, "are sometimes more difficult than bulls; they whip around faster and have better co-ordination. Don't let the name 'calf fool you. I've seen a lot of guys run through at
tientas.
ⁿ

Ava stood with Ernest at the ring wall, behind a wooden
barrera,
as they watched Dominguin work the first cow that came charging into the ring. After Dominguin's remarkably graceful performance, Ernest turned to Ava and said, "Did you see what Luis Miguel did to that cow? He made it into something. He convinced it. He gave it a personality and then made a star out of it. That cow went out of here proud as hell."

"He's a lovely man, isn't he?" Ava said.

"Are you serious about him?" Ernest asked.

"How do I know? We've been together for two months now, but I speak no Spanish, he speaks no English, so we haven't been able to communicate yet."

"Don't worry—you've communicated what counts," Ernest said.

At this point the cow Dominguin had been working, a mean little beast with a three-foot horn spread, suddenly lost interest in the
muleta
and decided to charge Ernest instead. Ernest had been leaning against the wall, a good distance away from the protective
barrera.
Everyone, and especially Mary, shouted at him to break for cover, but he did not budge and as the calf came charging into him he grabbed one of its horns with one hand and its nose with the other and flung it away from him. Dominguin then ran over and made the
quite
, leading the cow back to the center of the ring. "Not bad for a guy who's supposed to be beat up," Ava said to Ernest.

"I'm beat up," Ernest answered, "but not in the clutch."

Dominguin worked five calves, and when he was finished he was perspiring and tired. "Ah, Papa," he said, "if only I had your arms. Feel his arm," he said to Ava, pointing, and she did, approvingly. "Ah, the arms and the legs after so long a vacation," Dominguin said sadly.