ERNEST HEMINGWAY - Premium Edition. Ernest Hemingway
and went over to the hotel to get shaved for dinner. I was shaving in my room when there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” I called.
Montoya walked in.
“How are you?” he said.
“Fine,” I said.
“No bulls to-day.”
“No,” I said, “nothing but rain.”
“Where are your friends?”
“Over at the Iruña.”
Montoya smiled his embarrassed smile.
“Look,” he said. “Do you know the American ambassador?”
“Yes,” I said. “Everybody knows the American ambassador.”
“He’s here in town, now.”
“Yes,” I said. “Everybody’s seen them.”
“I’ve seen them, too,” Montoya said. He didn’t say anything. I went on shaving.
“Sit down,” I said. “Let me send for a drink.”
“No, I have to go.”
I finished shaving and put my face down into the bowl and washed it with cold water. Montoya was standing there looking more embarrassed.
“Look,” he said. “I’ve just had a message from them at the Grand Hotel that they want Pedro Romero and Marcial Lalanda to come over for coffee to-night after dinner.”
“Well,” I said, “it can’t hurt Marcial any.”
“Marcial has been in San Sebastian all day. He drove over in a car this morning with Marquez. I don’t think they’ll be back to-night.”
Montoya stood embarrassed. He wanted me to say something.
“Don’t give Romero the message,” I said.
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
Montoya was very pleased.
“I wanted to ask you because you were an American,” he said.
“That’s what I’d do.”
“Look,” said Montoya. “People take a boy like that. They don’t know what he’s worth. They don’t know what he means. Any foreigner can flatter him. They start this Grand Hotel business, and in one year they’re through.”
“Like Algabeno,” I said.
“Yes, like Algabeno.”
“They’re a fine lot,” I said. “There’s one American woman down here now that collects bull-fighters.”
“I know. They only want the young ones.”
“Yes,” I said. “The old ones get fat.”
“Or crazy like Gallo.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s easy. All you have to do is not give him the message.”
“He’s such a fine boy,” said Montoya. “He ought to stay with his own people. He shouldn’t mix in that stuff.”
“Won’t you have a drink?” I asked.
“No,” said Montoya, “I have to go.” He went out.
I went down-stairs and out the door and took a walk around through the arcades around the square. It was still raining. I looked in at the Iruña for the gang and they were not there, so I walked on around the square and back to the hotel. They were eating dinner in the down-stairs dining-room.
They were well ahead of me and it was no use trying to catch them. Bill was buying shoe-shines for Mike. Bootblacks opened the street door and each one Bill called over and started to work on Mike.
“This is the eleventh time my boots have been polished,” Mike said. “I say, Bill is an ass.”
The bootblacks had evidently spread the report. Another came in.
“Limpia botas?” he said to Bill.
“No,” said Bill. “For this Señor.”
The bootblack knelt down beside the one at work and started on Mike’s free shoe that shone already in the electric light.
“Bill’s a yell of laughter,” Mike said.
I was drinking red wine, and so far behind them that I felt a little uncomfortable about all this shoe-shining. I looked around the room. At the next table was Pedro Romero. He stood up when I nodded, and asked me to come over and meet a friend. His table was beside ours, almost touching. I met the friend, a Madrid bull-fight critic, a little man with a drawn face. I told Romero how much I liked his work, and he was very pleased. We talked Spanish and the critic knew a little French. I reached to our table for my wine-bottle, but the critic took my arm. Romero laughed.
“Drink here,” he said in English.
He was very bashful about his English, but he was really very pleased with it, and as we went on talking he brought out words he was not sure of, and asked me about them. He was anxious to know the English for Corrida de toros, the exact translation. Bull-fight he was suspicious of. I explained that bull-fight in Spanish was the lidia of a toro. The Spanish word corrida means in English the running of bulls—the French translation is Course de taureaux. The critic put that in. There is no Spanish word for bull-fight.
Pedro Romero said he had learned a little English in Gibraltar. He was born in Ronda. That is not far above Gibraltar. He started bull-fighting in Malaga in the bull-fighting school there. He had only been at it three years. The bull-fight critic joked him about the number of Malagueño expressions he used. He was nineteen years old, he said. His older brother was with him as a banderillero, but he did not live in this hotel. He lived in a smaller hotel with the other people who worked for Romero. He asked me how many times I had seen him in the ring. I told him only three. It was really only two, but I did not want to explain after I had made the mistake.
“Where did you see me the other time? In Madrid?”
“Yes,” I lied. I had read the accounts of his two appearances in Madrid in the bull-fight papers, so I was all right.
“The first or the second time?”
“The first.”
“I was very bad,” he said. “The second time I was better. You remember?” He turned to the critic.
He was not at all embarrassed. He talked of his work as something altogether apart from himself. There was nothing conceited or braggartly about him.
“I like it very much that you like my work,” he said. “But you haven’t seen it yet. To-morrow, if I get a good bull, I will try and show it to you.”
When he said this he smiled, anxious that neither the bull-fight critic nor I would think he was boasting.
“I am anxious to see it,” the critic said. “I would like to be convinced.”
“He doesn’t like my work much.” Romero turned to me. He was serious.
The critic explained that he liked it very much, but that so far it had been incomplete.
“Wait till to-morrow, if a good one comes out.”
“Have you seen the bulls for to-morrow?” the critic asked me.
“Yes. I saw them unloaded.”
Pedro Romero leaned forward.
“What did you think of them?”
“Very nice,” I said. “About twenty-six arrobas. Very short horns. Haven’t you seen them?”
“Oh, yes,” said Romero.
“They