Hemingway Adventure (1999) Read online

  The crowd takes against him immediately. He is punched and kicked and pushed down the stands into the ring where, to enormous applause, the police lead him off. Support for the authorities seems unanimous.

  Eight o’clock comes round and we hear the rocket that means the bulls are on their way. Only seconds later the first wave of runners spills into the ring, jogging briskly. They are followed by a second wave running more smartly, who are in turn followed by a third wave sprinting like hell. Almost unnoticed in the middle of all the human hysteria are the bulls, trotting in resolutely, rarely breaking their stride as they follow their guiding steers across the ring and away into the pens where they will stay until they go out to be killed nine hours later.

  This leaves the ring full of several hundred amateurs. A couple of American boys from Arizona who I’d met earlier in the day have run for the second time. Their eyes are shining as they shout at me from the other side of the barrier.

  ‘It was incredible.’

  ‘Frightening?’

  ‘Terrifying! But we did it! We did it!’

  ‘Now you’re used to it will you become a regular?’

  ‘No way! No way!’

  At that moment a gate swings open and they leap to safety over the barrier. They needn’t have worried. The animal that is released for the amateurs to try their skills on is not a bull, but a thin, though sprightly, cow with the points of its horns taped. It frisks off amongst the crowd, picking off people here and there. The crowd is very fair, any attempt to grapple the cow to the ground or even pull its tail being roundly booed.

  After a while the cow is brought back in and there is a brief pause before the next one emerges, which gives a chance for the bolder boys to play chicken by sitting in the ring as close to the gate as possible. Those brave enough to remain at the front can scarcely avoid being trampled by the animal as it’s released.

  This mass larking about goes on for another half-hour, and by nine o’clock the bullring starts emptying and the streets start filling again. Outside, by the television mobile trucks, a line of Hemingway fans waits to be photographed at the bust of Ernest which stands under the trees of an avenue called Paseo Hemingway. His head and shoulders seem trapped in the bulky granite plinth as if he’s half stuck in a recycling bin.

  The celebrations seem to have mellowed out on this second day. The dangerous sports boys have either crashed out on distant camp-sites or left town, looking for the next adrenalin rush. There are more locals on the streets, more bands playing, more families, more dancing and more entertainments laid on by the infinitely patient authorities of Pamplona. The police, who once fought the crowds here, seem to have learned the lesson that a crowd is only really dangerous when it has an enemy.

  At La Perla a woman in a dressing-gown, smoking and agitated, is in the lobby trying to make the receptionist understand that her hand-bag has been stolen from her room. She went down the passage to the lavatory and when she came back it was gone. A moment later it’s found. In her room. There’s a lot of this hyperactivity around but I’ve seen little crime and almost no aggression. But the pace is relentless and there is a sense in the air, if not of self-destruction, then something pretty close to it.

  It certainly stimulated Hemingway’s imagination and his third visit here, with his Anglo-American friends in July 1925, provided him with personal intrigues worthy of the location. By the time he left for Madrid he was putting the place and the people together in his mind, and when he reached Valencia, a fortnight later, he was ready to write the novel that immortalised Pamplona.

  Seventy-four years later, I’m leaving too. From the train window the sharp-ridged mountains and the twisting green valleys of Navarre are broadening into the plains as I head south to see Madrid and Valencia for myself.

  Hemingway was always more intrigued by bullfighting than bull-running. He was fascinated by matadors, whom he described memorably in Death in the Afternoon (1932) as ‘affable, generous, courteous and well liked by all who are superior to them in station, and miserly slave drivers with those who must work for them’.

  When he first visited Madrid in 1923 he was still starry-eyed and chose to stay at the Pension Aguilar in Via San Jeronimo ‘where the bullfighters live’.

  We are quartered in the Hotel Suecia where the Hemingways took a suite on his last visit to Spain thirty-six years later. The hotel does not seem to know, or care, that he stayed here, which is quite refreshing in a way, if a little odd, as the cultural centre next door is running an exhibition called ‘Hemingway y Espana’, consisting mainly of photographs of Ernest on that trip in 1959.

  The pictures are quite sad. His powerful build is much reduced and the white beard and wispy white hair make him look more like some venerable old prophet than a man only just out of his fifties.

  A first visitor to Madrid could do worse than follow the Hemingway trail, not just because so much of it still exists, but because he was a man of taste and did not waste his time on the second-rate.

  Across the road from the hotel is the Prado, one of the world’s greatest collection of paintings, where Hemingway caught up with his beloved Bruegels and Goyas and where I could spend an entire visit in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Delights.

  Then follow him, for refreshment, into the old quarter west of the Prado, where the narrow streets bear the names of writers like Cervantes and Lope de Vega and take a beer at the Cerveceria Alemana, a 96-year-old bierkeller with Spanish tiling and an open unfussy interior, which was one of Hemingway’s favourites. (If you feel oppressed by the presence of the Great Man, I recommend La Venencia just round the corner in the Calle Echegaray, of which there is no record of him ever entering. The speciality is sherry served from the cask and the peeling walls are stained a rich tobacco brown.)

  Hemingway would likely have repaired at this point for a cocktail in the Art Deco elegance of Chicote on the Gran Via, a cocktail bar founded in 1931 ‘to promote talk and opinion’. Chicote earned Hemingway’s undying loyalty by never closing throughout the bombardments of the Spanish Civil War. There’s another photo of him here, from 1959, frail and bearded.

  Though you may be hungry by now, remember that Spanish restaurants don’t expect you for dinner until well after nine. Hemingway fans will take his recommendation and head straight for Casa Botin, which has been serving meals for over 200 years and whose wood-fired ovens turn out herds of roast suckling pig every night. It’s easy to find. Down the steps at the south-west corner of the Plaza Mayor, into Calle Cuchilleros (Knife-maker Street) and it’s practically next door to a restaurant with a large sign, ‘Hemingway Never Ate Here’.

  As it is inconceivable that anyone but an invalid should be in bed in Madrid before one-thirty, I’m easily tempted into a post-prandial night-cap. We head for the focal point of the old city, the wide cobbled expanse of the seventeenth-century Plaza Mayor with, at its centre, a fine statue of Philip III on a charger. The Plaza is grand, but car-free and friendly and full of bars which make it almost impossible to cross without feeling thirsty.

  Bar Andalu, like Botin, is traditional, but ‘traditional’ in Spain is not so much of a tourist board cliche as it is elsewhere, and generally means something still very close to the spirit of the country.

  Three great bulls’ heads loom out of the wall surrounded by an exhaustive collection of framed photographs showing matadors in moments of cape-swirling glory or gory and gruesome injury.

  Machismo drips from its tiled and trophied walls, and it is perhaps no coincidence that, as I eventually leave to totter home, I notice for the first time the truly heroic proportions of the testicles on Philip III’s horse.

  Hemingway, Spain and bullfighting are inseparable. After his visit in 1923 in which he wanted to live where the bullfighters lived, he was, as you might say, hooked.

  He returned year after year. The bullfighter first appears in his books in The Sun Also Rises and, a few years later, in an exhaustive aficionado’s guide called Death
in the Afternoon, which James Michener called a kind of Bible of bullfighting. It still is one of the best books on this arcane art.

  Hemingway returned to the subject in 1959, when he crisscrossed the country to chronicle the series of mano a mano (one-to-one) contests between two leading matadors. Life magazine had commissioned a 10,000-word piece, but he turned in a first draft of 120,000 words, reduced to 45,000 after his death, and published in 1985 as The Dangerous Summer.

  Whatever I feel about bullfighting, I can’t come to Spain and avoid it. I decide to follow the advice Hemingway gives in the opening chapter of Death in the Afternoon.

  If those who read this decide with disgust that it is written by someone who lacks their … fineness of feeling I can only plead that this may be true. But whoever reads this can truly make such a judgement when he, or she, has seen the things that are spoken of and knows truly what their reactions to them would be.

  So here goes.

  Thirty minutes south of Madrid, in flat hot countryside, is a farm where bulls are bred for the ring. It is owned by Jose Antonio Hernandez Tabernilla, a lawyer whose family has bred them since 1882. He has records that trace the ancestry of each bull as far back as 1905.

  Jose Antonio and his wife are a tall, handsome couple, courteous, well informed and much more comfortable with English than I am with Spanish.

  The farm is functional, with low outbuildings and nothing fancy other than a barn in which are displayed old stirrups, halters, bridles, saddles and various other taurine and equestrian accessories. Framed bullfight posters hang on the walls, of which the most curious is one detailing a corrida (the Spanish word for a bullfight) specially laid on for Heinrich Himmler in 1940.

  Apparently the famous Nazi found the whole thing too cruel and left after the second fight.

  They introduce us to a stocky man in early middle-age who wears a T-shirt and a white straw hat with ‘Benidorm’ on the ribbon. This is Serafin, the farm manager. He is shrewd, and taciturn. More comfortable with bulls than the BBC. We are piled unceremoniously into a farm trailer, and with Serafin driving the tractor, and two or three dogs running on ahead, we’re hauled along a bumpy track into the fields where a hundred and forty Santa Coloma fighting bulls are kept. Most of them appear to be sitting comfortably in a pear orchard at the far end of a wide paddock. They like the shade there, says Jose Antonio, and they love the pears.

  Jose Antonio explains that they mustn’t have too much contact with humans, as this may compromise their fighting ability later. In fact the calmer and quieter a state they can be kept in the better.

  There is a sudden commotion at one end of this taurine health farm as two of the ash-grey bulls spar up to one another. Instantly the dogs race off and separate them. Which is quite something to see. These are two- and three-year-old bulls and look quite big enough to me, but by the time they have reached the fighting age of four they will weigh between 500 and 600 kilos - over 1200 lbs.

  Serafin examines each bull with a critical eye, the strength of their shoulders, the size of their horns, already singling out those that will make the best fighters. Jose Antonio says that though he’s proud of rearing good fighters, Serafin ‘suffers terribly to see his animals die.’

  Jose Antonio feels bullfighting has changed. Like everything else it is adapting to the market, to the needs of television. He used to send his bulls to Pamplona, but they don’t want them any more because their horns don’t look big enough.

  Back at the farm, refreshment is provided. The irresistible jamon serrano (cured ham), olives and wine. I practise drinking the farmers’ way - from the spout straight into the mouth, or in my case, down the shirt.

  On our way back to Madrid, near the town of Arganda, we stop at a triple-span bridge over the River Jarama. A big new road is being put through here and in amongst the rubble and the electricity pylons is a ten-foot-high metal star, leaning at an angle, surrounded by weeds. A plaque beside it marks it as a monument to the International Brigade, those volunteers from outside Spain who came over to fight against Franco and Fascism in the war of 1936-9.

  The Spanish Civil War, the second of three wars in which Hemingway saw action, and the one which produced his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, was the most politically committed time of his life. He wrote commentary and helped raise finance for a propaganda film, shot by a Dutchman, Joris Ivens, and called Spanish Earth.

  Orson Welles, enlisted to record the commentary, wanted to change some of the lines which he thought sounded unduly pompous. At a viewing of the film, described by Welles in Cahiers du Cinema, he and Hemingway came to blows, going at each other with chairs and fists, as the armies fought it out on the screen in front of them.

  The two American heavyweights were reconciled over a bottle of whisky, and though Welles still gets the credit in some of the early prints, it is Hemingway’s flat, harsh monotone that accompanies the film.

  It’s half past eight on a Sunday morning and in the hard dry sunlight a group of prostitutes is working a corner of the Casa de Campo, one of the great straggling parks of Madrid.

  Not that that’s why I’m there, though my business in the park at this time is essentially macho. In amongst the prostitutes and the pine trees is an Escuela de Tauromaquia, a school of bullfighting.

  Yesterday I witnessed the care and attention that goes into raising bulls to be killed. Today I am to witness the equal amount of care and attention that goes into killing them.

  The school, considered the best in the country, has its own miniature ring and whitewashed outbuildings, on which are painted the breeders’ marks, which will be found branded on every bull. They are sometimes letters, sometimes symbols and have an ancient cabalistic feel to them.

  Inside the ring the class is assembling. All boys (though there is one potential female matador), mostly in their teens with the quick eyes and lean, combative stance of lads from the streets. But appearances can be deceptive, and one eighteen-year-old, Fabian, turns out to be from a Mexican family who had enough money to send him to school in Texas in the hope of curing his desire to become a bullfighter.

  That didn’t work and he has not only been attending classes here for three years, he has also dispatched fifteen or sixteen bulls already. He shrugs off my incredulity. One of the top three bullfighters in Spain, El Juli, is only seventeen years old, he says, and smaller than him.

  A portly older man enters the ring and calls the boys together. They address him as maestro and I assume that one day before his stomach grew he was as light and lithe as the boys he’s teaching. He picks up two banderillas, the spiked sticks which are placed in between the bull’s shoulder blades as it charges, and begins to demonstrate the moves.

  The bull is, I’m relieved to see, not flesh and blood, but a set of horns and a padded cushion fixed to a bicycle wheel. One boy races this contraption fast across the ring and another has to go close enough to drop the barbed prongs exactly parallel to each other in precisely the right spot. Nine out of ten times they fail, but, as Fabian points out, only one or two of this class of thirty might be good enough to even contemplate fighting professionally.

  Under Fabian’s guidance I am allowed to try some moves with the cape, pink on one side and gold on the other, with which the matador tries to tire the bull in the second stage of a fight. The first thing that strikes me is how heavy it is, heavy enough, of course, to maintain its shape in all weather conditions.

  Fabian corrects my posture, emphasising the importance of the strut, of thrusting the hips forward, of staring the bull down. I ask him what he thinks when he’s confronted with the bull. Does he have to hate it?

  ‘No, no,’ he shakes his head firmly. ‘The bull is my friend.’

  I’m rather touched by this, until he adds, ‘He makes me look good and make a lot of money.’

  How much money?

  Fabian considers for a moment. The top fighters? Around $80,000 for a corrida, in which he will fight two bulls. From that he will have to pay his
team - his picadors and his bander-illeros - but if he fights fifty times in a season his earnings are into the millions. And then there’s advertising, public appearances, opening supermarkets.

  I look around me. A big clear sun beats down on the ring. Half the apprentices are practising their passes with the cape and half are clutching horns and racing at them. I’m struck by how absurd and how deadly serious it is at the same time.

  In the dedication required bullfighting has overtones of medieval knights and chivalric orders, of ancient rules and disciplines. Of something almost monastic.

  I thank Fabian and wish him well. I suppose a time will come when he will be hurt, does that worry him?

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He nods and smiles, ‘Oh, yes.’

  I must say, understanding bullfighters requires dedication too. Now I have to find somewhere in Spain where I can see them in action.

  Atocha Station in Madrid is a rather wonderful combination of ancient and modern, achieved by building a completely new terminal without pulling down the old one.

  The platforms are laid out beneath a superstructure of concrete columns, functional and practical and quite severe, while the old nineteenth-century station, cleaned and restored, now houses a tropical garden around which are seats and cafes, from which you can look up at the incongruous cloud of steam drifting from the jungle up to the roof.

  We climb aboard a train for Valencia, following in the footsteps of Ernest and Hadley who left Madrid for Valencia in 1925 on their way back from Pamplona.

  Hemingway knew there was a story to be written about what had gone on in Pamplona that year, but was torn between his need to write it and his need to see as many bullfights as possible. Valencia, where there was a midsummer feria (a festival with bullfights), seemed the ideal combination. Work in the morning and the corrida in the afternoon. And it worked. The Sun Also Rises was begun in Valencia in July 1925.