I recognized him all of a sudden, walking with his wife, Mary Welsh, along Boulevard Saint-Michel, in Paris, one day in the rainy spring of 1957. He was walking on the opposite sidewalk in the direction of the Jardin du Luxembourg, and he was wearing some very well worn jeans, a checked shirt, and a baseball cap. The only thing that didn’t seem like his were the tiny, metal-rimmed, round glasses, which gave him a premature grandfatherly look. He had turned fifty-nine, and he was enormous and too visible, but he didn’t give the impression of brute strength he no doubt would have liked because his hips were a bit narrow and his legs didn’t have much flesh on the bones. He looked so lively among the secondhand bookstalls and the youthful torrent from the Sorbonne that it was impossible to imagine he would be dead in barely four years.
For a fraction of a second—as has always happened to me—I found myself divided between my two rival trades. I didn’t know whether to interview him for the press or just cross the avenue to express my unconditional admiration. For both intentions, however, there was a similar large disadvantage: back then I spoke the same rudimentary English I’ve always spoken, and I wasn’t very sure of his torero’s Spanish. So I did neither of the two things that might have ruined the moment, but cupped my hands to my mouth, like Tarzan in the jungle, and shouted from one sidewalk to the other, “Maeeeestro!” Ernest Hemingway realized there could be no other maestro among the crowd of students, and turned with his hand raised, and shouted back to me in a slightly childish voice, “Adióóóós, amigo.” It was the only time I ever saw him.
I was then a twenty-eight-year-old journalist, with one novel published and a literary prize back in Colombia, but I was stranded and aimless in Paris. My two greatest masters were the two North American novelists who seemed to have the least in common. I had read everything they had published so far, but not as complementary readings, but the exact opposite: as two different and almost mutually exclusive ways of conceiving of literature. One of them was William Faulkner, whom I never saw with my own eyes and whom I could only imagine as the farmer in rolled-up sleeves scratching his arm beside two little white dogs, in the famous portrait Henri Cartier-Bresson took of him. The other was that ephemeral man who just said adiós to me from the other side of the street, and had left me with the impression that something had happened in my life, and it had happened forever.
I don’t know who said that novelists read other novels only to see how they’re written. I believe it’s true. We aren’t content with the secrets exposed on the front of the page, but have to turn it over, to decipher the stitching. In some impossible-to-explain way we take the book apart into its essential pieces and put it back together again once we know the mysteries of its personal clockwork. That temptation is disheartening in Faulkner’s books, because he didn’t seem to have an organic system of writing, but wandered blindly through his biblical universe like a herd of goats loose in a glassworks. When you manage to dismantle one of his pages, you get the impression that there are extra springs and bolts and that it’ll be impossible to put it back again into its original state. Hemingway, on the other hand, with less inspiration, with less passion, and less madness, but with a lucid rigor, left his bolts visible on the outside, like in railway cars. Maybe that’s why Faulkner is a writer who has a lot to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who’s had most to do with my trade.
Not only with his books, but also with his startling knowledge of the artisanal aspect of the science of writing. In the historic interview the journalist George Plimpton did for The Paris Review, he taught once and for all—against the romantic concept of creation—that economic comfort and good health are advantages for writing, that one of the biggest difficulties is organizing words well, that it’s good to reread one’s own books when the work is difficult to remember that it was always difficult, that you can write anywhere as long as there are no visitors or telephones, and that it’s not true that journalism finishes off the writer, as so many have said, rather quite the contrary, as long as you give it up in time. “Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure,” he said, “only death can stop it.” For all that, his lesson was the discovery that each day’s work should only be interrupted when you know how you’re going to start the next day. I don’t think anyone has ever given a more useful piece of advice for writing. It is, no more, no less, the absolute remedy against the writer’s most feared phantom: the morning agony facing the blank page.
All of Hemingway’s work demonstrates that his spirit was brilliant, but of short duration. And it’s understandable. An internal tension like his, submitted to such a severe technical control, is unsustainable within the vast and risky scope of a novel. It was a personal condition, and his mistake was to have tried to exceed his splendid limits. That’s why everything superfluous is much more noticeable in him than in other writers. His novels seem like outsize stories overflowing with too many things. On the other hand, the best thing about his short stories is the impression they give of missing something, and that’s precisely what bestows their mystery and their beauty. Jorge Luis Borges, who is one of the great writers of our time, has the same limits, but he has had the intelligence not to exceed them.
Francis Macomber’s single shot at the lion teaches so much as a hunting lesson, but also as a summary of the science of writing. In some story he writes that a bull, after brushing past the chest of the bullfighter, turned “like a cat coming around a corner.” I believe, in total humility, that this observation is one of those brilliant pieces of foolishness that are only possible in the most lucid writers. Hemingway’s work is full of those simple and dazzling discoveries, which demonstrate up to what point he clung to his own definition that literary writing—like an iceberg—was only valid if it is sustained below the water by seven-eighths of its volume.
That technical awareness will no doubt be the reason that Hemingway does not reach the heights of glory with any of his novels, rather with his strictest short stories. Talking about For Whom the Bell Tolls, he said he did not have a preconceived plan while composing the book, but rather invented it each day as he was writing. He didn’t have to say so: it shows. However, his instantaneously inspired stories are invulnerable. Like those three he wrote in an afternoon one May 16 in a pension in Madrid, when a snowfall forced the cancelation of the San Isidro bullfights. Those stories—as he himself told George Plimpton—were “The Killers,” “Ten Indians,” and “Today Is Friday,” and all three are masterly.
Within that strand, to my taste, the story where his virtues are best condensed is one of his shortest: “Cat in the Rain.” However, although it seems like a mockery of fate, I think his most beautiful and human work is his least successful: Across the River and into the Trees. It is, as he himself revealed, something that began as a short story and went astray in the mangrove swamp of a novel. It’s difficult to understand so many structural cracks and so many errors of literary mechanics from such a wise technician, and some dialogues so artificial and so contrived from one of the most brilliant dialogue craftsmen in the history of literature. When the book was published, in 1950, the criticism was ferocious. Because it was not accurate, Hemingway felt wounded where it hurt most, and defended himself with a passionate telegram from Havana that did not seem worthy of an author of his stature. Not only was it his best novel, but also his most personal, for he had written it at the dawn of an uncertain autumn, with the irreparable nostalgia of the years lived and the nostalgic premonition of the few years he had left to live. In none of his books did he leave as much of himself nor manage to capture with such beauty and such tenderness the essential sentiment of his work and his life: the futility of victory. The death of his protagonist, so apparently natural and peaceful, was the coded prefiguration of his own suicide.
When you cohabit for so many years with the work of a beloved writer, you inevitably end up blending fiction with reality. I have spent many hours of many days reading in that café on the Place Saint-Michel that he considered such a good place to write, because he thought it pleasant, warm, clean, and friendly, and I have always hoped to encounter that girl again who he saw come into the café on a cold windy afternoon, and who was very pretty and fresh-faced, with her hair cut diagonally like a crow’s wing. “You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me,” he wrote for her, with that inexorable power of appropriation his literature had. Everything he described, every instant that was his, goes on belonging to him forever. I cannot pass number 112 on Rue de l’Odeón, in Paris, without seeing him talking to Sylvia Beach in a bookshop that’s no longer the same, playing for time until six o’clock in case James Joyce comes by. On the plains of Kenya, just by seeing them once, he became the owner of its buffalos and lions, and of the most intricate secrets of the art of hunting. He made himself the owner of bullfighters and boxers, artists and gunfighters, who only existed for an instant, while they were his. Italy, Spain, Cuba, half the world is full of places he appropriated just by mentioning them. In Cojímar, a tiny village near Havana where the solitary fisherman of The Old Man and the Sea lived, there is a commemorative bandstand with a bust of Hemingway painted with gold varnish. At Finca Vigía, his Cuban refuge where he lived until shortly before he died, the house is intact among the shady trees, with his disparate books, his hunting trophies, his writing lectern, his enormous dead man’s shoes, the countless knickknacks of his life from all over the whole world that were his until his death, and that go on living without him with the soul he instilled in them just by the magic of his dominion. Years ago I got into Fidel Castro’s car—and he is a stalwart reader of literature—and saw a small, red, leather-bound book on the seat. “It’s Hemingway, the master,” he said. In reality, Hemingway is still where one least imagines him—twenty years after his death—as persistent and at the same time as ephemeral as that morning, which was perhaps in May, when he said adiós, amigo, to me from the other side of the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
July 29, 1981, El País, Madrid