Papa Hemingway (26 page)

A partridge wheeled up in front of the car from a roadside ditch and Ernest took careful aim with his extended arm and fired, his arm leading the bird in a perfect pattern of its flight. He constantly practiced this way.

"Did you get him, lamb? Mary asked.

Ernest nodded. "Best training I got for shooting birds was from my father. He used to give me only three shells for a whole day's hunting, and he was very strict about shooting only on the wing. He had his spies around, so I never tried to cheat.

"You know the professors in their thin, erudite volumes describe my unhappy childhood which supposedly motivated all my literary drives. Christ, I never had an unhappy day I can remember! I was no good at football, but does that make an unhappy boyhood? Zuppke put me at center but I never knew what a digit was—I skipped third grade so never found out about digits—so I couldn't figure out the plays. I used to look at my teammates' faces and guess who looked like they expected the ball. I was called Drag-Ass when they put me at guard. I wanted to play backfield but they knew better. There was one guy on the team beat me up in the locker room every day for two years, but then I grew up to him and I beat the be-Jesus out of him and that was the end of that.

"In Chicago, where you only used fists, there was this guy pulled a shiv—"

"A what, honey?"

"—a knife and cut me up. We caught him and broke both his arms at the wrists by twisting till they snapped. That was Chicago. Then, gentlemen, we have Kansas City. Contrary to the professors' published reports, my first job on the Kansas City
Star
was to find the labor reporter in one of several drinking haunts, get him sobered in a Turkish bath, and get him to a typewriter. So if the professors really want to know what I learned on the
Star
, that's what I learned. How to sober up rummies.

"But the professional pundits don't want to settle for that. Professor Carlos Back-up and Professor Charles Fender and Professor Philip Youngerdunger, wearing the serious silks of Princeton and Yale and N.Y.U., feed my collected works into their Symbol Searcher, which is a cross between a Geiger counter and a pinball machine, or maybe they use their economy-sized death-wish indicators, which can also turn up complexes, both certified and uncertified, at the flick of the dial; then they ask me serious symbol-oriented, death-wish-oriented questions for their serious works which they afterwards read aloud to their classes in Serious Lit IV, three credits; but because I answer them in baseball terminology, which is a much more exact science than literature, they feel I do not take them Seriously. Mr. Hemingway, please expostulate on your sublimated death-wish as expressed in
The Sun Also Rises.
Answer: As sublimated as Whitey Ford's death-wish when he throws to Ted Williams. Mr. Hemingway, do you give credence to the theory of a recurring hero in all of your works? Answer: Does Yogi Berra have a grooved swing? Mr. Hemingway, what is the symbolism of Harry Morgan's maimed arm and Colonel Cantwell's maimed hand and Jake Barnes' maimed genitals? Answer: Put 'em in with Mickey Mantle's maimed legs, stir well, and if they don't bat four hundred send 'em all to the Decatur Minotaurs."

Mario stopped in a little town to get gasoline and we went into the cafe next to the filling station to get something to drink. A
boule
game was in progress outside, but inside it was crowded with black-bereted men, some of whom were playing dominoes, others watching. The cafe had a packed-dirt floor, and an army of flies had pierced its beaded curtain.

Back on the road again, Ernest told us more shooting stories. He recalled the time, coming back on the boat from Europe, when, pretty broke, he entered a skeet-shooting contest and won it by hitting forty consecutive birds and then all the birds in the shoot-off. "But all through the shoot all I could see was a blur, and since I know clay pigeons can't travel
that
fast, when I hit New York I went to see an eye doctor. That's when I got my first glasses. I went out of the office with them on and I saw things so clearly for the first time in my life, I began to get nauseated. I was only a block from Bob Bench-ley's so I went up to his place and we both got cockeyed drunk and that got me over the nausea."

"My God!" Mary interrupted. "I forgot my purse. Turn back! My God, Mario, turn around!"

Mario turned back as Mary explained, between gasps, that while we were in the cafe, which by now was thirty minutes away, she had placed her handbag on a sidewalk table in front of the place. It contained both Hemingway passports and their total floating capital of two thousand dollars in traveler's checks and fifteen hundred dollars in cash, plus a few choice jewels. "Oh, God, but I'm sorry, Papa!" Mary said. "How stupid! Hotch took that picture and I put down the bag and . . . what a place to leave it! Roughest-looking men I ever saw."

"Well," Ernest said, in a too quiet voice, "let's all just sit back and offer up prayers to whatever saints we have an account with."

For the rest of the return trip no one spoke a word. When we pulled into the village, we could see a small group accumulated on the sidewalk in front of the cafe. Standing beside a table, virtually at attention, was a Guardia Civil who had been summoned to stand watch over Mary's bag, which was on the table exactly where she had left it.

As we pulled up, Ernest said, "Well, Senator McCarthy, now you know why we fought in the Lincoln brigade."

The Hotel Felipe II is located on the heights of the Escorial, in command of a golden panorama that extends clear to Madrid: the golden wheat fields and the golden autumn trees and the weathered roofs gilded by the Spanish sun. For Ernest, the Felipe II was his castle where he was "forted-up good." Goya was the architect, Velasquez the landscape gardener. You stand on the balcony of your room and breathe in the mountain air, which is as clear and sharply cold as the rushing water of the streams; the valley fans out below; from the distance you hear the musical sounds of workmen shaping the mountain stones for houses they are building; the Escorial eagles, the hawks, the inquisitive storks wheel patterns above and below, their widespread wings buoyed by the steady slip stream of air current. There is an old Spanish saying, "The wind off the

Escorial couldn't blow out a candle but it can kill a man."

Ernest joined me on the balcony and listened to the echoing tones of the rock-tapping. Far below us, in the little town of Escorial, school was dismissed and the children's cries spiraled up to us light as wood smoke. "You could have a house built here for the price of your electric bill in Westport," he said. Then he extended his arm into a shotgun and dropped a close-circling hawk in its tracks.

"I always feel wonderful here. Like I've gone to heaven under the best auspices. Very hard to worry under these conditions. Also feel very secure because of local motto, 'A man with a beard will never starve.' "

The first few days at the Felipe II, Ernest was busy and lively, although he still drank too much at night. Most of his activities centered around setting up the safari with Antonio, which necessitated a stream of cables to Abercrombie's and to Kenya.

One day he had the hotel fix us a picnic lunch and we drove high up into the Escorial mountains to the area that was the locale for
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Ernest showed me the cold mountain stream where Pilar washed her feet, the cave where Pablo's band lived, the bridge, since rebuilt, that was the target of the book. The bridge was much higher and thicker and more impregnable-looking than I had imagined. We walked across it and Ernest pointed to where the real events fictionalized in the book had taken place. At one end of the bridge there was a small stone house that had been destroyed by Loyalist fire, and it remained in the state of ruin in which it had been left in 1933.

We ate our picnic lunch beside Pilar's stream, surrounded by pine beauty, and afterward we drove to the nearby ancient town of Segovia, which also figures prominently in
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Its distinguishing feature is an awesome Roman aqueduct, in perfect repair, that towers magnificently over the ancient cobblestoned town. Ernest bought four partridges from an old hunter he knew and lottery tickets from a blind man, intending to distribute the tickets to various employees at the Felipe II. Ernest was always very considerate of hotel people who served him. There was a bellboy at the Felipe II who aspired to be a matador, and Ernest had already bought him a pair of two-year-old bulls to fight.

The food in the Felipe was ordinary, so we often dined in Madrid, which was thirty-two minutes away. Without exception, we ate at El Callejon, a windowless Pullman-shaped crowded restaurant that was low on atmosphere but very high on cuisine. Ernest took generous tastings from our plates, but in ordering for himself he always kept strictly to his diet of no beer, starches or meat; fish, salads, vegetables, and calves' liver were permissible; so was Scotch, without limit. I could never determine whether this diet was self-prescribed or doctor-prescribed.

Those first few days Ernest took events in stride. Ava Gardner came out from her home in Madrid, bringing Peter Viertel's shooting script for
The Sun Also Rises.
"You have to read it," she told Ernest. "I know you weren't paid, since they could remake the original for nothing, but for your own pride you have to read it and change things. Everyone in the script runs around saying,
'C'est la guerre
,' and peachy things like that."

Ava stayed all evening; we drank an impressive amount of champagne, and Ava was lively and funny and beat both of us in an impromptu olive-pit-flipping contest at the bar; Ernest enjoyed himself and said that Ava was one of the good ones.

The following day Ernest read the movie script and cabled Peter Viertel to come to Madrid immediately. I had never seen him so truculent. All these signs pointed to a revived Ernest, but the morning of the fifth day I was there, his revivification was shot down in flames. First, I received a cable from a magazine requesting me to return to Vienna to write a follow-up on a piece I had done on the Budapest uprising (this canceled out the races); then Antonio cabled to say that events had arisen to preclude going to Africa (safari canceled). As if this wasn't bad enough, Polly Peabody came out in the afternoon, frantic because Rupert, nine years in the bosom of Alcoholics Anonymous, had suddenly embraced
vino tinto,
plunged himself into a wild state of intoxication, and disappeared.

That night Ernest got very drunk. He was argumentative with Mary during dinner, which featured the partridges he had bought in Segovia; he did not touch his. Mary left the table as soon as she could, leaving Ernest and me in the deserted dining room (it was off-season and we were the only diners that night). Ernest talked endlessly and not too coherently about the war, while drinking several bottles of wine. His plans had been destroyed and he was taking solace in the past.

When I finally got him up to his room, he stopped in the hallway a few feet from his door and glowered at an electric wall-fixture. He suddenly went into a boxer's crouch, feinted with his left a few times, then hit the light with a neat right hook that broke the bulb and knocked the fixture onto the hall carpet. The metal tore a gash in his knuckle, which started to bleed, but he paid no attention to it. He put his other hand on my shoulder and looked at me intently. "Hotch, I been drunk one-thousand five hundred and forty-seven times in my life, but never in the morning." He opened the door of his room and disappeared.

Ernest came into my room the following morning, accompanied by the hotel barber, and asked if he could have his hair cut there so as not to wake Mary. His face and eyes were parchment. "Invented a new double
dicho
last night," he said. "Thought is the enemy of sleep." He suggested that since this was getaway day for me I should see some Prado pictures and eat a last meal at the Callejon.

We planned to leave at ten o'clock, but it was eleven-thirty by the time Ernest went through his usual predeparture check list of his flask, his various car vests and caps, cleaning tissue for his eyeglasses, his comb, his Swiss officer's escape knife, his capital, his lucky chestnut, a spare coat, and, on this occasion, urine specimens he planned to take to the doctor that afternoon.

As we walked through the lobby on our way to the car, two men intercepted Ernest. They identified themselves as a reporter and a photographer for a German magazine.

"I thought I told you guys when you phoned from Madrid, no interviews," Ernest said.

The reporter said he had been instructed to go out anyway and begged Ernest for just ten minutes so he wouldn't lose his job. Ernest said we were trying to make the Prado to see pictures before they closed for the afternoon, but that he would give them ten minutes if they could stick to it and take absolutely no pictures. We all went out on the terrace outside the bar and Ernest sent for a Scotch to ease him through the ordeal.

From the beginning it was obvious that the reporter had never read anything Ernest had written. In a thick, sausage accent he asked, Is this your first trip to Spain? Have you seen any bullfights before? Do you speak Spanish? Do you write your novels or dictate them? Ernest was tolerant at first, but when the reporter asked, How many women have you been in love with? Ernest opened up.

"Black or white?"

"Well, how many of each?"

"Seventeen black, fourteen white." The reporter was getting it all down in his notebook.