Happy Friday, all! In what I hope becomes a tradition between us, may I present the weekend’s short story, Hemingway’s “The Capital of the World,” published in 1936?
España. Socialist waitstaff, tipsy priests, and down-on-their-luck matadors. There’s gore, unrequited lust, and terse sentences. Classic Hemingway, in other words. While one can take from this remarkable tale many themes and concepts, the one that has stuck with me since I read it in the aft steering aboard my first ship, the USS Rodney M. Davis (FFG-60), is our indifference to the suffering of others compared to our own fixations. It’s the sort of story that, once read, demands contemplation.
The beginning goes:
Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is the diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY ALL IS FORGIVEN PAPA and how a squadron of Guardia Civil had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement.
But this Paco, who waited on table at the Pension Luarca, had no father to forgive him, nor anything for the father to forgive.
He had two older sisters who were chambermaids at the Luarca, who had gotten their place through coming from the same small village as a former Luarca chambermaid who had proven hardworking and honest and hence given her village and its products a good name; and these sisters had paid his way on the auto-bus to Madrid and gotten him his job as an apprentice waiter.
He came from a village in a part of Extramadura where conditions were incredibly primitive, food scarce, and comforts unknown and he had worked hard ever since he could remember.
He was a well built boy with very black, rather curly hair, good teeth and a skin that his sisters envied, and he had a ready and unpuzzled smile.
He was fast on his feet and did his work well and he loved his sisters, who seemed beautiful and sophisticated; he loved Madrid, which was still an unbelievable place, and he loved his work which, done under bright lights, with clean linen, the wearing of evening clothes, and abundant food in the kitchen, seemed romantically beautiful.
There were from eight to a dozen other people who lived at the Luarca and ate in the dining room but for Paco, the youngest of the three waiters who served at table, the only ones who really existed were the bullfighters.
Second-rate matadors lived at that pension because the address in the Calle San Jeronimo was good, the food was excellent and the room and board was cheap.
It is necessary for a bullfighter to give the appearance, if not of prosperity, at least of respectability, since decorum and dignity rank above courage as the virtues most highly prized in Spain, and bullfighters stayed at the Luarca until their last pesetas were gone.
There is no record of any bullfighter having left the Luarca for a better or more expensive hotel;
second-rate bullfighters never became first rate;
but the descent from the Luarca was swift since any one could stay there who was making anything at all and a bill was never presented to a guest unasked until the woman who ran the place knew that the case was hopeless.
At this time there were three full matadors living at the Luarca as well as two very good picadors, and one excellent banderillero.
The Luarca was luxury for the picadors and the banderilleros who, with their families in Seville, required lodging in Madrid during the Spring season; but they were well paid and in the fixed employ of fighters who were heavily contracted during the coming season and the three of these subalterns would probably make much more apiece than any of the three matadors.
Of the three matadors one was ill and trying to conceal it; one had passed his short vogue as a novelty; and the third was a coward.
The coward had at one time, until he had received a peculiarly atrocious horn wound in the lower abdomen at the start of his first season as a full matador, been exceptionally brave and remarkably skillful and he still had many of the hearty mannerisms of his days of success.
You can read the rest here. (If a pop-up impedes your reading, try clicking away from it or refreshing the page, and the intrusion should reset for a time.)