Authors: A. E. Hotchner
By evening, with time out for the afternoon's
corrida
which featured worthless bulls and matching matadors, Ernest had filled his table at the Choko with the characters he had selected as his mob for the
feria.
Two of them had been anticipated, Dr. Vernon Lord from Ketchum and his wife, Lee, but the rest were impromptu. A young Glasgow girl I'll call Honor
Johns, red rounds on her cheeks and hair that shocked up like a black wool tiara, supposedly a reporter for a Glasgow weekly (we had our doubts); a tall, gaunt guitarist y-clept Hugh Millet, who sang calypso verses he had composed and was accompanied by the sweet, soft voice of his pretty French wife, Suzie; a pert canary-blonde named Beverly Bentley (now Mrs. Norman Mailer), the star of a Smell-o-Vision motion picture,
A Scent of Mystery,
then being shot in Spain; a young man from Hawaii, Mervyn Harrison, who had interviewed Ernest in Ketchum the previous winter for an English thesis he was allegedly writing and had ended the interview by putting the bite on Ernest for money to finance six months in Paris to learn French at the Sorbonne. The six-month period had just ended.
Antonio, who was not on the card for the
feria,
showed up that evening with his manager, Pepe Dominguin, who was Luis Miguel's brother; Ernest, Bill and I joined them in an all-night revel of dancing in the streets and singing and drinking in the cafes. Everywhere Ernest went he ran into men he had known years before, and these chance meetings always called for an acceleration of drink and song.
Around four in the morning, as we were marching down a narrow Pamplona street five abreast, arms linked, singing, we were approached by a small white Renault that had a beautiful young face peering from behind the right windshield.
"They shall not pass!" Antonio shouted.
"Capture the girl!" Ernest commanded.
Antonio jumped up on the hood of the Renault as Pepe opened the door on the driver's side and extracted a short, perspiring Frenchman who wore a pork-pie hat and gloves and was on the verge of incoherency. From the other side there emerged a stunning young lady who first looked at Antonio and said, in Midwest Americanese, "Aren't you Antonio Ordonez?" And then, as if it weren't enough to be captured by the ruling matador, she turned and saw Ernest and said, "Aren't you Ernest Hemingway?" and I thought she was going to faint.
By now the Frenchman had stammered out the message that the car belonged to the lady, whom he scarcely knew, and he was just driving her because she couldn't find her apartment, and while we were loudly arguing over whether we should lock him up in the trunk he escaped into the night. Ernest solemnly informed the girl, who identified herself as Teddy Jo Paulson of Williston, North Dakota, that she was an official prisoner; she was absolutely delighted and asked whether we would please go to her apartment and take her traveling companion prisoner too.
Bill knew all the little streets in Pamplona the way he knew most Spanish towns, and in no time we had roused Teddy Jo's roommate, Mary Schoonmaker, from her sleep. "True beauty," Ernest said to me, "is to wake up looking like that."
Antonio took us to a club where there was a loud orchestra with everybody singing as they danced, and we had such a hell of a time we almost missed the first running of the bulls.
Each day of the
feria,
in the early morning, the bulls for that day's
corrida
are released from the pens at one end of town and they run along a street that leads to the bull ring. It is traditional to join the group of men and boys who race down the street in front of the onrushing bulls: front runners get a big head start, middle runners keep a modest distance ahead, and then the brave ones or crazies, depending on your point of view, try to stay as close to the bull pack as possible without getting gored.
Ernest ran with the bulls in the old days but now his legs were too unreliable. Antonio, of course, ran just in front of the bulls—with the crazies. I ran at the rear of the middle runners where, glancing over my shoulder, I had a good view of the bulls and the crazies. We were about halfway to the ring when the crowd, which solidly crammed the fences and windows and balconies, suddenly cried out, and I looked back to see that one of the crazies had slipped and a big black bull with huge antlers had splintered off to get him. That's when I noticed Antonio. He had been carrying a rolled-up newspaper and now he was running over toward the fallen man, unfurling the newspaper and yelling,
"Toro! Huh! Toro
/" at the bull.
The bull hooked once for the fallen man but his horn went over him and then Antonio swept the newspaper in front of his eyes and he went for that. The fallen man scrambled to his feet and ran as Antonio again passed the bull with the newspaper, but this time the paper recurled itself and uncovered Antonio's leg and the horn got him. At that moment Ernest, who had rushed to the fence, pulled off his jacket and flapped it against the fence and the bull charged that, banging his horns into the wood planks, which he splintered. Antonio limped to the opposite barricade, which a policeman opened to let him escape.
I had stopped running to watch Antonio but now I realized I was being swept up by the vanguard of the crazies, who were coming on fast with the phalanx of horns on their tail, so I got the hell out of there with a burst of speed that only wild bulls can inspire.
Antonio's horn wound was in his right calf, but because of the ignominious manner in which it had been inflicted he refused to pay any attention to it. He danced all day and night and then again ran with the crazies the following morning just to prove whatever he wanted to prove. Only then he finally listened to Ernest and let Vernon Lord give him an antitetanus shot and clean and dress the nasty gash.
Ernest was absolutely correct about sleep and the lack of it. I went to my rented room only once; it was dark and smelled of urine from the flat's one toilet which was next to it, so I never went there again. Instead, whenever I felt like sleeping for an hour or so I curled up in the back of the Pembrook Coral. Sometimes Ernest would join me and sleep sitting up in the front seat. He had recognized several pickpockets of superior talent who were working the
feria,
so when we slept in the car we put our money inside our pants. Before going to the bullfights, we all gave our valuables to Ernest, who stowed them in his pickpocket-proof Hong Kong jacket.
Teddy Jo and Mary Dos (Mary Hemingway, naturally, was Mary Uno) became inseparable members of the basic
cuadrilla;
when Ernest discovered that they both taught mathematics he was delighted because, he said, it wasn't often a
cuadrilla
got beauty and intellect in one handy package. But on the second day we lost one of the mob—Mervyn Harrison of Hawaii. Quite simply, he overslept and failed to show for that afternoon's bullfight, letting the hard-to-get and much-sought-after ticket go to waste. Then, that evening, when Ernest asked him if they had taught him how to oversleep at the Sorbonne, he confessed that he had not gone to the Sorbonne with Ernest's borrowed money but had discovered a superior way to learn French. "I met this Paris girl," Mervyn said, "who could not speak a word of English, so when we started to sleep together I
had
to learn. I tell you, Papa, that's the place to learn a foreign language— in bed!"
"Yes, but what you learn there," Ernest said, "is sometimes difficult to work into an ordinary, everyday conversation."
I don't know precisely how Ernest handled it, but we never saw Mervyn again. When he did not reappear Ernest simply said, "Well, our boy, Mervyn, has just become a complete stranger. Never discuss your casualties, gentlemen."
Just to the northeast of Pamplona are the Irati River and its forests, which were such an integral part of
The Sun Also Rises;
Ernest was afraid that they had been completely ruined, but his fears proved unfounded. For four afternoons we picnicked at various places along the river, going higher and higher up the mountain, leaving at noon, getting back just in time for the bullfight. We traveled in three cars, each car responsible for part of the picnic, which flourished with squabs, cheeses and cold smoked trout, Navarre black grapes and brown-speckled pears, egg plant and pimientos in a succulent juice, unshelled shrimps and fresh anchovies. The wine was kept cold in the clear Irati water, and each day we swam up the river, which flowed through a gorge between the high-rising walls of the beech-covered mountain. It was miraculous to leave the wild tumult of the
feria
and a half hour later to be in the midst of this primitive, quiet beauty.
One day after lunch Ernest and I sat on the pebbly bank, contemplating the view, which consisted of circling hawks, rising mountains, and the seven women of our
cuadrilla
who were napping at various levels on warm rock ledges above the opposite bank. "Nymphs on shelves in nature's store," Ernest said. '"What a hell of a happy time." He watched a hawk plummet earthward and disappear, then re-emerge beating skyward with a small prey struggling in his talons. "You know, Hotch," he said, his eyes on the hawk, "it's all better than
The Sun Also Rises."
Ernest sat with his back against a beech trunk, his lips pleas-urably parted, his old eyeglasses in his lap, patting an itinerant hound dog who had sought him out, and as I studied him I thought, This is different for Ernest than anything we have ever done, for this is not the enjoyment of memory, but the enjoyment of experiencing. This summer we are not revisiting the windswept slopes of the Escorial to see the vestiges of
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
or driving slowly along the road he once cycled with Scott Fitzgerald or walking along the circuitous Left Bank route he used to take from his unheated room to the Jardin Luxembourg to avoid the tantalizing restaurant smells; this summer, unlike the others, is young.
When we got back to Pamplona that afternoon, having missed the bullfights, there were two cables waiting for Ernest. One was from Toots Shor:
ernie, where shall i send the four thousand bucks, you bum
? Ernest laughed. "Toots is burned up because I phoned him from Malaga, just before we met you, and asked him the odds on Johansson against Patterson. When he said the boys were laying four to one on Patterson I told him to put down a G for me on the Swede, but he tried every which way to talk me out of it. I don't bet much on fights any more. Have a new rule: never bet on any animal that can talk—except yourself."
The other telegram was from David O. Selznick, who had just completed a remake of
A Farewell to Arms
with his wife, Jennifer Jones, starred as the novel's heroine, Catherine Bar-kley. He had not paid Ernest anything for this version because back in the Twenties the book had been sold outright with no provision for remakes. This telegram said that Selznick had just informed the world press that although not legally obligated to, he was hereby pledging himself to pay Mr. Hemingway fifty thousand dollars from the profits of the picture, if and when it earned any profits.
Ernest, who had never kept secret his lack of affection for Mr. Selznick, dictated a telegram in reply saying that if by some miracle, Selznick's movie, which starred 41-year-old Mrs. Selznick portraying 24-year-old Catherine Barkley, did earn $50,000, Selznick should have all $50,000 changed into nickels at his local bank and shove them up his ass until they came out of his ears.
After Pamplona we rested for a few days in Madrid before going down to Malaga for a birthday party that Mary Uno had been working on for nearly two months. July 21st was Ernest's sixtieth birthday and also the birthday of Carmen, Antonio's wife; the Bill Davis house, La Consula, in Churriana on the southern coast of Spain, was to be the locale. Set in the midst of a huge, elegantly gardened estate, La Consula is a colonnaded mansion of delicate mien that looks like the palace of a junior Doge. It is protected by outer and inner gates, both manned, and its furnishings, mostly handmade by Spanish artisans working from Bill Davis's designs, and its art complement its exterior. Floors and balustrades, stairs and table tops, bathrooms and porticoes are all marble, and marble envelops the swimming pool. There is no telephone.
Mary really knows how to give a party and she pulled out all the stops on this one. She felt that Ernest's birthdays, because of his lack of co-operation, had always been observed with a pause rather than a celebration, and she was determined to make up for all the lost birthday parties this time. She succeeded.
She had ordered champagne from Paris, Chinese foods from London, and from Madrid,
bacalao,
which is a dried codfish that is the basic ingredient for the highly seasoned Bacalao Vizcayina, one of her specialties. She had hired a shooting booth from a traveling carnival, a fireworks expert from Valencia, which is the citadel of fireworks, flamenco dancers from Malaga, musicians from Torremolinos, and waiters, barmen and cooks from all over.
The Davis house sleeps only twenty-five, so Mary had taken over a couple of floors of a new skyscraper hotel, the Pez Espada, on the beach in nearby Torremolinos. The invitees came from all over, and they began arriving on the twentieth.
In addition to the members of the regular Pamplona
cuadrilla,
Ernest had invited a large number of other Pamplona people and some from Madrid. There also arrived the Maharajah of Jaipur with his maharanee and son, the Maharajah of Cooch Behar with his maharanee, General C. T. "Buck" Lanham from Washington, D.C., Ambassador and Mrs. David Bruce, who flew down from Bonn, various Madrid notables, several of Ernest's old Paris pals, thirty friends of Antonio's, and Gian-franco Ivancich, Adriana's brother, who arrived from Venice with his wife driving Ernest's new Barrata Lancia which had been bought out of his Italian royalties.