Ernesto y Antonio

HEMINGWAY AND BULLFIGHTING
[Excerpts from José Luis Castillo-Puche's Hemingway in Spain:A Personal Reminiscence of Hemingway's Years in Spain.]


Since in the bullring Ernesto hoped to find not only the grace note of aft that embellishes life, but also the breath of immortality that would enable him to tolerate the nothingness of existence, the bullring came to be the one path of escape he attempted to follow.

...he had hung out above all in the callejon-the passageway for the matadors behind the wooden fence-seeking to learn the secret of Spanish stoicism.

The matador is like the celebrant of a sort of sacred rite, to use Hemingway's definition, or the depository of a sacred treasure, to use an irreverent but similar figure of speech.
The torero is death's intermediary: he has the power to both give and receive it. And on approaching the mystery of death, it is not only his own death but a death that belongs to all those in the plaza de toros who are willing and able to receive it.

The bullfight involves a kind of liturgical emotion; it is a moving sacrifice that is almost religious in character.

"Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters." (The Sun Also Rises)

Hemingway's first meeting with Antonio Ordóñez
Son of the bullfighter Niño de la Palma,who was the model
for the young matador and hero of The Sun Also Rises.

Bullfighting was a miraculous solution for him...he began to see life as the great corrida because it is so unpredictable. The corrida might be a few trancelike moments of great valor, an instant of serenity...it may also be helplessness, a ridiculous lack of guts, craven cowardice in the face of the brave bull.

You can't read For Whom the Bell Tolls without Ernesto or Robert Jordan or the guerrillas mentioning something to have to do with the bullring. Event the Spanish Civil War was only an extended metaphor to Ernesto: one long, tragic bullfight.

"Tell me, do you believe in God?"

And Ernesto replied in that half-joking, half-serious way of his, "Well, God to me is like the greatest killer of bulls ever."

"Life is one big bullring and there isn't anyway out of the ring for anyone."

crisdovale