Hemingway Adventure (1999) Page 7

  Unlike 1944, our progress is almost completely ignored. Though tourists wave and point, the first French people to acknowledge a tank in their traffic are two gendarmes who bring us to an undignified halt half-way up the Avenue Hoche and demand to see our papers.

  The good news is that the papers are in order. The bad news is that the tank won’t start again. Patrick and his assistant tinker around for a while before diagnosing a failure in the fuel supply. It might take an hour or two to get it fixed, so they suggest we try and kick start it. Just how easily the filming process can turn human beings into automatons is that we all without question agree to Patrick’s suggestion that we push the tank.

  In 1944 he would doubtless have had thousands of willing volunteers, but today there’s half a dozen of us and we manage to shift it only as far as an old lady crossing the road, who shrieks at us in a most un-liberated way.

  Patrick notices a tow-truck about to hitch itself to a trailer full of builder’s rubble. He races through the traffic and manages to persuade the driver to hook up to the tank instead. He agrees with remarkably good grace and after a moment the M8’s engine is conjured into life with a puff of smoke and a flash from the rear exhaust.

  The liberation of Paris is never quite the same after this, but trundling across the cobbles towards the Arc de Triomphe, encased in inch-thick steel, is not a bad way to remember the place.

  All that’s missing are the martinis.

  As we prepare to leave Paris I have the same feelings I always have when I leave Paris. I have been happy here and I’m full of admiration for this well-run city and the way it respects and displays its heritage of antiquity, elegance and culture. But Paris is impossible to thank. It will not soften and allow itself to be hugged around the shoulder as you say goodbye. Unlike Venice, or Chicago, or even New York, it has no sentimental side. It outlasts and outshines everyone, and Hemingway recognised this too.

  ‘Paris’, he wrote in a piece for Esquire magazine in early 1934, ‘was a fine place to be quite young in and it is a necessary part of a man’s education … But she is like a mistress who does not grow old and she has other lovers now.’

  By that time there was another place Hemingway had fallen in love with. It was, along with Italy and France, the third, and most important of that triumvirate of European countries in which he felt truly happy. Gertrude Stein had pointed him in its direction and he had already used it as a setting for the novel that had made him famous. It was Spain and the Spanish way of life that were to remain the greatest influence on him from now on.

  SPAIN

  In December 1921 the Leopoldina, en route from New York to Le Havre, put in at Vigo in the province of Galicia on the north-west coast of Spain.

  ‘You ought to see the Spanish coast,’ Hemingway wrote to Sherwood Anderson. ‘Big brown mountains looking like tired dinosaurs.’

  And in a letter to his childhood friend Bill Smith, he compared Galicia with north Michigan. ‘We’re going back there. Trout streams in the mts. Tuna in the bay. Green water to swim in and sandy beaches … Cognac is 4 pesetas a litre.’

  Though he was only there four hours, he came up with an article on tuna fishing for the Toronto Star Weekly. In it, apart from an uncanny foretaste of a later book, is the essence of all that attracted him to Spain.

  ‘The Spanish boatmen will take you out to fish for them for a dollar a day … It is a back-sickening, sinew straining, man-sized job … but if you land a big tuna after a six-hour fight, fight him man against fish when your muscles are nauseated with the unceasing strain, and finally bring him up alongside the boat, green-blue and silver in the lazy ocean, you will be purified …’

  Struggle, peasant pride, redemption through physical pain, the confrontation with nature that strips away sham and compromise. This is what comfortable, bourgeois Oak Park Ernest saw in Spain and it drew him like a magnet.

  Pamplona, capital of the proud and ancient Spanish province of Navarre, is a sturdy walled town girdled with modern housing blocks and the gleaming factories and assembly plants that are the rewards of belonging to a greater Europe.

  Its name is known all over the world for the running of bulls through its streets at the festival of San Fermin. Though there are seventy such bull-runs all over Spain, this is the one everybody knows about. That’s because Ernest Hemingway came here.

  So I can’t help thinking about him with mixed feelings as I arrive late on a cool afternoon, with a light drizzle falling on me as I push my way through an army of Hemingway-driven celebrants back-packing their way into town.

  Pamplona is preparing to receive this army. Barriers are going up on the roads, and prices are going up in the bars. Few will have booked far enough ahead to find a room. Most search out doorways, park benches, traffic roundabouts or simply sleep where they fall. Hemingway’s part in establishing the international reputation of the fiesta is celebrated by a series of red wall-posters showing his venerable bearded likeness, which are attached to any building with which he was connected.

  There is one on the wall of the hotel in which I have a room - the Hotel La Perla, tucked away in a corner of the big central square, the Plaza del Castillo. The Hotel Quintana, which was cheaper and where Hemingway preferred to stay, is no longer in existence.

  La Perla manages to be discreet and at the centre of the action at the same time. Inside it exudes an old-fashioned respectability. The lobby gives on to a dimly lit salon filled with long-case clocks, gilt-framed mirrors, crystal chandeliers and two stunningly incongruous bulls’ heads thrust lugubriously out of one wall on either side of a portrait of the bullfighter Lalo Moreno, brother of the hotel owner. He looks grave, as matadors tend to do.

  When Ernest and Hadley first discovered the fiesta, they reckoned they were the only English-speaking people in town. Nowadays you can barely find a table outside La Perla that is not occupied by a hard core of world-wide fiesta addicts who return here every year. There is a strong Swedish contingent. One of them, Hans Tovote, known to everyone as ‘To-To’, has written a novel about Pamplona, and another, Alf Tonnesson, has booked room 217, the one Hemingway stayed in, until the year 2040. There are Norwegian, French and British groups, with their own clubs and insignia. There are numerous bearded Americans who look like Hemingway and many more pretending to be Hemingway.

  I walk through the arcades of the square to the Cafe Iruna, which displays another Hemingway poster. He and his friends would hang around here watching the action and drinking absinthe (now considered too strong to be legally served). It features heavily in The Sun Also Rises and, with the help of a jug or two of sangria, you can slip quite effortlessly back into the Lady Duff Twysden era. Only when you look more closely at the passing crowd, do you realise that time has moved on.

  A procession approaches, demonstrating for the release of ETA (Basque Nationalist) prisoners, still held for terrorist activities. Then they in turn are gone, swamped by the crowd of lanky, baseball-hatted international youth slowly taking over the Plaza before the big day.

  I catch sight of a copy of El Mundo. It has a page devoted to San Fermin on the Internet. The headline reads ‘Gracias a Hemingway’.

  ‘At noon of Sunday July 6th the festival exploded, there is no other way to describe it.’ Hemingway’s description in The Sun Also Rises (published as Fiesta in Europe), captures the moment but hardly does justice to the build up.

  The streets at the heart of the city are cordoned off to all but essential traffic - drink deliveries, street-sweepers, ambulances - as we join the tide of humanity flowing inexorably down cobbled streets with boarded-up windows, towards the Town Hall where the opening ceremony takes place.

  The correct outfit for San Fermin is a white shirt, white trousers and a splash of red - a neckerchief, a sash - in memory of the blood spilt by the saint himself when he was beheaded, or, some say, killed by bulls, over a thousand years ago.

  What seems to be absolutely obligatory is that you drink as much as possible and what
you don’t drink you spray all over your friends. So bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, are popular, as is a cheaper alternative called kalimotxo, a mixture of wine and Coca-Cola made to a simple recipe - buy a litre bottle of Coke, drink half and fill it up with wine.

  From our camera position at a third-floor window we watch a group of young men and women, some in green plastic hospital gowns, rush into the square carrying a bucketful of booze, two large bags of flour and a stack of egg boxes. Now I know why half the balconies are shrouded in plastic sheeting. Within minutes flour and eggs are flying from all sides.

  With half an hour still to go before midday, the crowd is glued together in one single, sticky mass, a pulsating human pancake, dancing, shouting and chanting on a carpet of slime and broken glass. A boy with short, spiky, peroxide blond hair leaps onto one of the columns on the town hall facade and, thrusting out his chest like a modern-day St Sebastian, screams at the crowd to throw things at him. Bottles of cava are shaken furiously and released in a thousand mini-orgasms as the crowd hysteria builds towards the one great unifying climax of the midday rocket.

  It sounds like hell, but it is a hell of exuberance - a manic, but largely good-natured, yell of liberation. I’m just noting down this bon mot when there is a crack on the glass, followed by a roar of approval as a second egg whistles in, scoring a direct hit on our sound man.

  At a minute or two before twelve, those cameras not disabled by edible missiles can send their viewers throughout Spain and the rest of the world pictures of the town officials, in braided frock coats and old-fashioned tricorn hats, stepping out on to the ornate Town Hall balcony to an immense reception.

  ‘San Fermin! San Fermin!’

  Trumpeters step forward and blow a fanfare which no one can hear, after which, accompanied by one last cataclysmic bellow, the midday rocket goes up and eight and a half days of non-stop partying begins.

  Below us the mass of people squeezed near to suffocation point begins to shift and break up as it spills out of the square and into the surrounding streets, which are full of sodden, egg-and flour-encrusted groups imploring those on the balconies above to tip buckets of water over them.

  Up one side street is a drinking fountain with a central tower about fifteen feet high. This has been colonised by young Australians and New Zealanders who dare each other to climb up and throw themselves off. The only safety net between them and the pavement is the crowd itself.

  By the time we get back to La Perla the Plaza del Castillo has been transformed. Young, unsteady people of all nations are swaying about. A flopped-out figure wakens to find his friends have tied his hands to the bench he’s been sleeping on. High-pressure water jets scour the space around the bandstand sending an arc of plastic and glass bottles scudding across the ground towards the circling garbage trucks.

  I talk to two regular American visitors. Curly is tall with a stack of grey hair; his friend, who introduces himself, without irony, as John Macho, is short and stocky. As the rubbish swirls by behind them they declare themselves Pamplona addicts. They love the fiesta, the people, the bulls.

  Most of them know somebody who has been hurt in the bull-run and Curly has had his leg broken. His injury, as with most others, was not caused by a bull but by someone trying to get out of the way of the bulls. A fifty-something man from Austin, Texas, offers me several reasons why this will be his fifth consecutive year on the bull-run, of which the most intriguing is: ‘It’s an aphrodisiac, Michael. Believe me.’

  Believe him or not, I can’t help thinking Viagra would be a lot easier.

  Whoever you speak to, the talk is all of the next high - the encierro (running of the bulls) which will begin tomorrow morning at eight o’clock sharp.

  There is not much rest to be had in Pamplona tonight. Those who have run with the bulls before will try to sleep as best they can. Those who haven’t will, likely as not, have been awake most of the night saucing themselves up. Those of us who are here to film have to be getting into positions on the course by six o’clock. And the noise goes on. It’s like the night before battle.

  Stepping out of La Perla into that half-day, half-night just after the dawn breaks is like stepping into a time vacuum. All the people who were on the square last night are still there, wearing the same clothes. The same music is playing from the same bars. The same street-cleaners are cleaning the same patches of street. Only the smell is different. Fortified by the excesses of the night, the town radiates a sweet, sickly smell of stale booze. An indoor smell that’s been let out. The soles of my shoes stick to the flagstones of the arcade. The religious and the bacchanalian seem to merge seamlessly at the festival of San Fermin.

  The encierro is the name given to the driving of the bulls from their corral on the outskirts of town to the ring in which they will fight later in the day. Over the years it became a feature of the Pamplona encierro that locals and visitors would try and run before the bulls along a course of just over half a mile. The event was in full swing before Hemingway whetted the world’s appetite by describing it in his first bestseller, The Sun Also Rises. Later, James Michener helped things along with his book, The Drifters.

  With endorsements from authors like Hemingway and Michener, running with the bulls became one of the great international tests of maleness, a chance to participate in an ancient tribal rite, still surviving in the midst of modern Europe. More recently, women have been allowed to run. Whether this will eventually deal the macho tradition a mortal blow remains to be seen.

  Not that I can see many women on the streets this chilly morning. The participants are almost exclusively male and range from the experts, mostly Spanish, who take it seriously and will remain as close to the bulls as possible, to the young, already drunk college kids for whom this is just another stop on the dangerous sports circuit.

  I have been invited by Alf and To-To, the two Swedish aficionados, to watch the run from the balcony of the room Hemingway took at La Perla. This gives directly on to the narrow street called Calle Estafeta. Before they reach here the bulls will have run uphill from the corral into the Town Hall square, left at Chargui Ladies Lingerie, past Liverpool Video Club and Compact Disc Centre and sharp right at Ana’s jewellery shop. There are no barriers in this street, and nowhere to hide, so man (and woman) and bull will get pretty close to each other.

  With an hour still to go the balconies are filling up with families, friends, and those who’ve rented these viewpoints for thousands of pesetas. At 7.30 police and colourful officials in scarlet berets and tunics begin to clear the course. Anyone poking out of a doorway is pushed firmly back in. At 7.40 a squad of street-cleaners comes through, personal high-pressure vacuum cleaners strapped to their backs, followed by a second line with brushes and black rubber buckets. At 7.45 the live television coverage begins and I can see our street on a screen in the building opposite. With ten minutes still to go, an eerie, unnatural calm descends. The runners, held in groups at different starting points, shift from foot to foot, lick their lips and tighten their grip on the rolled-up newspapers which are traditionally carried with the hope of landing a thwack on a passing bull.

  At 7.52 a safety announcement is made in different languages. At 7.55 I catch a glimpse on television of one of the bulls, still in the corral, steam rising gently from his nostrils, his great head framed against the green hills beyond the city. Nothing in the four years of his life so far can have prepared him for what is about to happen.

  At eight on the dot the rocket goes off, the bulls are released and all the concentrated energy that has been building up to this moment crackles along the course, a psychic shock-wave that affects the most dispassionate spectator. When the bulls come in sight they seem the calmest creatures in town, running in disciplined order behind accompanying steers, heads lowered, eyes forward, whilst humans scamper hysterically around them flicking their papers and occasionally grabbing at a horn.

  In a few seconds they’ve gone past, and everyone looks to the nearest te
levision screen to see what really happened. I see one brown bull run close to a barrier, stripping off its line of spectators one by one. They’re already playing back a goring which took place outside Ana’s Jewellers. Then the second rocket sounds, indicating safe arrival of the bulls at the ring.

  To-To consults his watch.

  ‘Two minutes thirty seconds. That’s good.’ He seems vaguely disappointed.

  ‘The longest I ever saw lasted fourteen minutes. One bull was detached from the rest and then they turn angry, you know. There was quite a pile-up.’

  The runners filter back into the square and soon the bars and cafes are full of tales of daring exploits and valiant feats with rolled-up newspapers.

  Rumours of serious injury, even death, chase round the city. One positive fact, reported in the Diario de Navarra, is that thirty tons of broken glass were removed from the streets yesterday.

  On Hemingway’s advice I leave the hotel at half past five this second morning to be sure of a ringside seat to watch the amateur bullfight that takes place at the end of the encierro. ‘Pamplona is the toughest bullfight town in the world,’ he wrote in the Toronto Star Weekly. The amateur fight that comes immediately after the bulls have entered the pens proves that.’

  This may be Ernest pumping himself up a little for, though there is no evidence that he ever ran with the bulls, there is a photograph of him dodging horns at the ‘amateurs’.

  Certainly the ring fills up fast, but the great number of spectators are teenagers, excited boys and girls who throw themselves energetically into Mexican waves and sing-alongs. A tired brass band plays in the middle of the ring. The only really hard behaviour comes from an angry young man with a shaved head who seems determined to take on the rest of the world with a virtuoso display of taunts, leers and obscene gestures.