‘Won’t it be splendid,’ Brett said. ‘Spain! We will have fun.’ – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
It was my idea. It’s been my idea for about 35 years. I like to think that, deep down, it is everyone’s idea. If it hadn’t been for Hemingway, I wonder if many foreigners would attend a bullfight festival held in honour of an obscure Catholic martyr in an even more obscure Basque town in Navarre.
Revisiting Pamplona during his dangerous summer of 1959, Hemingway himself complained about the 40,000 tourists. He was lucky. Now, there must be 250,000. The novelist was first in Pamplona in 1923 for the Fiesta of San Fermin, what the Spaniards call Las Fermines. After his third Fermines, in 1925, he wrote The Sun Also Rises. Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s narrator, did not run with the bulls. He was the watcher, aloof from the passions around him while others lived it. The story is about the passion, aficion, of the man outside the blood and gore of the plaza. Its heroine is the dissolute Brett Ashley, a woman who “only wanted what she couldn’t have.” Most male readers love the story – and the woman. Too many have followed Jake Barnes to Pamplona, July after July.
My friend Nick Scott and I began with dinner in Paris, as Jake Barnes did, at the Cafe Select in Boulevard Montparnasse. It was after midnight when we got there and took a table outside. I imagined it in the early 1920s, when Americans came over to escape Prohibition and all it represented. Last year, the novelist Norman Mailer took the part of Hemingway in a play-reading in Paris based on the letters of Hemingway and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Later, someone asked him why so many American writers had fled to Europe in the 1920s. Mailer’s answer? “I guess they got tired of being around a lot of stupid people.” The Select opened in 1923 and had yet to become the venerable, self-important establishment it is now.
Jake Barnes and the rest soaked themselves in quantities of wine, absinthe, cognac and whisky. Nick and I tried to keep up in homage to our mission. When we arrived in Bordeaux the next morning, Nick suggested a walk outside the station. “That’s what they did,” he said, having more or less memorised the book and determined to stick to it. Jake and his friend Bill Gorton stopped to change trains, as we did. We had a drink, as they must have, a bottle of Chateau Canterane.
In Bayonne, we stayed in the Grand Hotel. It must have been much as it was in 1925, but for the “Best Western” prefixed to its name. I showered and called Nick, who wasn’t in his room. He had been out wandering and came back to announce he had found the perfect restaurant for dinner.
The Asador was the sort of place the man later called Papa would have loved. Clean, well lit and full of Basque aficionados, it served one of the best cotes de boeuf I have ever eaten. We had bottle after bottle of Ribera del Duero, a red worthy of the steak. I asked who San Fermin was. Nobody seemed sure, apart from one old man who said the saint was a martyr. “They cut his throat,” he said, slicing a finger over his own. Thus the red bandana knotted around every neck at the Fiesta, with white trousers, white shirt and red waist sash: white for Fermin’s purity, red for his sacrifice.
The Asador’s chef, who was also its proprietor, sat down at a table with his wife and talked bullfighting. He complained that the bulls were not as good as they used to be, which is what Hemingway wrote in the 1950s.
All went well, until Nick decided to stir up trouble. Sensing the temper of his audience, he told them I was a rabid communist. The mood turned like a knife. They waited for me to say Nick was joking. Nick had the advantage. A Scotsman who had lived near Seville for 20 years, he spoke perfect Spanish. I knew barely a word. If Nick was drunk enough to provoke people whose fathers probably fought for Franco, I was drunk enough to let them believe him. I am not, as it happens, a communist, but enough of a lefty not to disavow those who battled fascism in the Spanish Civil War. I had to leave the restaurant before its proprietor reached for a cleaver and did to me what the pagans did to San Fermin. Nick and I nearly fought over the incident as we walked in darkness past the cathedral. But it did give the trip a certain authenticity.
All was well again the next morning. We took a taxi, as the characters did, over the border towards Pamplona. The book did not give their route, and we were free to stop for lunch in San Sebastian. Brett had had an affair there before her fiance, Mike Campbell, arrived to take over. Nick’s own Brett would be waiting for him in Pamplona. (I do not mention her name, because – in a world reminiscent of Hemingway’s – her ex-husband would kill her or Nick if he knew.) My Brett was far away, in another country with another man, and I won’t go into that except to say that it, too, is Hemingwayesque and tragic.
I went to Mass in the cathedral. Nick and I had drinks in the main plaza, then a lunch of beans, chorizo and excellent Vina Ardanza. Several bottles into what Nick called “the best cheap wine in Spain,” a gypsy band played in the doorway. My memory sailed along on a sea of alcohol and strings to Hungarian violinists playing gypsy serenades in 1964 at the Beverly Wiltshire Hotel. It was the first time I had played grown-up, aged 13 and stuffed into a rented dinner jacket at dinner before the premiere of the film Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. My date was one of the first girls I remember kissing, or trying to. I wrote her many letters from my boarding school. She never wrote back.
After lunch, we were ready for Las Fermines. We took rooms in Pamplona at the world’s most expensive cheap hotel. The Tres Reyes in Pamplona hosts a horde of white-shirted Anglo-Saxons for one week a year, and they all pay about 10 times the rate they would for any of the other 51. We asked for its manager, Senor Fernandes, who was arranging our tickets for the bullfights. A receptionist told us that Fernandes was sleeping off a drinking session. It seemed odd that a manager who had only one week a year to do any real work would choose that week to get drunk. This was Spain, this was the Fiesta and nobody cared.
In the streets, thousands of Australians, Americans and Brits sweated, drank and vomited. Nick and I went to the town hall to pace off the route we planned to run the next morning, as far ahead of the charging bulls as possible. Nick was a veteran, I was a Pamplona virgin. The cobbles seemed too slippery with sick and beer to guarantee sufficient traction. Nevertheless, I bought the uniform.
“Brett” arrived in time for dinner and we got ready for the bulls by drinking all night. That is, Brett and I drank all night. Nick turned in early, about three, leaving Brett and me to talk about alcoholism, bravado and stupidity. And, alas, Nick. At five, I went up to the hotel. At six, Nick called.
‘The things that happened could only have happened during a Fiesta.’ – The Sun Also Rises
I recall losing sight of Nick before they let the bulls loose. The crowd smelled much as you would expect of several thousand young men who had been drinking, without washing, all night. They were friendly, some more frightened than others. We waited outside the town hall, penned by wooden barriers, with nowhere to go.
When someone fired a shot to release the bulls, nothing happened. Then the police opened the gate ahead of us, and we moved like hell. They say it takes two and a half minutes for the mob and the bulls to reach the ring, but it seemed like a marathon. A young Australian slipped just in front of me. The form, if you fall, is to lie still and hope the bulls won’t notice your inanimate form on the ground. But this poor guy was liable to be trampled to death by human feet.
I stopped and helped him up, although a dozen men bashed into me from behind. He was already drenched in beer, but he had the manners to say, “Thanks, mate.” We ran on and on, past people who, for whatever reason, stood in doorways. I’d like to say it was frightening or that I was brave, but it was nothing more than a little run in a big crowd. We reached the bullring and watched the steers lead the bulls into their pens.
Suddenly, we found ourselves, like gladiators, performing for a packed arena. The spectators cheered as if we had fought the bulls rather than run from them. Then I saw, a few rows up, the bravest men in all Pamplona – waving a banner that denounced cruelty to animals.
Nick was beside the barrier. We wanted to get away for a drink, but there was no obvious way out. A steer bounded into the ring. He was not the sort of beast that could bore into you with his horns, but he could knock you down and break your arm. As two men in our fifties with grown children, I felt we had done enough, but we had to run around and around to avoid the steer’s attention. An Australian tried to grab his horns and was thrown into the dust. It was all in good spirit, and we finally climbed several rows of seats to an exit to find a bar. It was 8.30am.
In the afternoon, Senor Fernandes – sober and engaging – gave us our bullfight tickets. Nick and I had the props of manhood: full whisky glasses, cigars and stories of our morning run through the streets. With Brett beside us, we watched three mediocre matadors butcher six cowardly bulls. It was a pitiful sight, demonstrating the difference between sex and bullfighting. When sex is bad, it’s still pretty good. Nothing redeems a bad bullfight. Afterwards, we went to bars and to another grand dinner, more grilled cotes de boeuf on the bone and Vina Ardanza, at an old monastery. We drank all night before starting again.
‘In the morning it was all over.’
– The Sun Also Rises
In the morning, I fell in love. She was a Basque waitress named, as I understood her, Inhoa. A fair-haired girl with a celestial face, her shape was the fuel of passion. We had no common language, but we smiled at each other all day – as we had, apparently, the night before. We spent a lot of time trying to talk in the wooded park behind the hotel, but I am not sure it will go anywhere. If I write to her, I fear she won’t write back.
By the end of the week, four Pamploneses – those who run with the bulls – were dead and a few more injured. Brett flew home.
Nick and I made our way to Madrid, as both fictional Jake and the real Ernest did. Like Jake and Brett, we had our last dinner at Botin. At 278 years of age, Botin is said to be the oldest restaurant in the world. For company, we had two beautiful Spanish women. The food was suckling pig. More Vina Ardanza, cigars and laughter and song. We left, Nick’s Madrid Brett kissing his neck, and walked towards the Plaza Mayor. We had done it, the Fiesta from the Select to Botin. We had survived the bull run, the Aussies and the alcohol. Our friendship was, miraculously, intact. Then we saw it, the benediction of our journey on a sign over an open door: “Hemingway never ate here.”
