The Real Spaniard

Editor’s Note: We have a vague idea that Mr. Hemingway intended this article as a follow-up to the essay by Louis Bromfield on “The Real French” that appeared in The Boulevardier last month. Hemingway wrote that "the article was written partly by me, mostly by my wife, and re-written by a citizen named Arthur Moss, who put in all the funny cracks."*

With relation to Spain. Yanquis (as the Spanish call them) seem to be divided into three classes, i.e. (1) those who have been there like Alexander Moore and Washington Irving; (2) those who have never been there but live in California; (3) those who have read Virgin Spain; so until reading Bromfield in the September Boulevardier, I had never thought whether Spaniards were real or not. Bromfield has opened my eyes but there is no use my trying to write like him as in the above paragraph, as I haven’t: (1) the education; (2) the ease and social position.

I spent the European war in Spain it is true as an attaché to the Spanish army, sleeping often enough in dunghills and châteaux and the like, but to me, the Spanish never seemed real. Somehow they didn’t. They seemed like cathedrals. Perhaps I was youthful and romantic. Perhaps not. Perhaps they were cathedrals. I remember one night in the trenches a little way out of Madrid sleeping with a number of beautiful Spaniards in what, looking back on it now, must have been a dunghill. It may have been a dunghill. I remember thinking it was a dunghill and, the war still being on, looking around for Bromfield, or Brommy as we called him then. He was not there and I remember the Ambassador was very upset and said, “Those aren’t cathedrals, Hem. Those aren’t cathedrals. Don’t you know you’re in a dunghill?”

They seemed like cathedrals. Perhaps I was youthful and romantic. Perhaps not. Perhaps they were cathedrals.

As I recall I made no answer to His Excellency’s remark beyond an abortive attempt to interest him in my search for the real Spaniard. The Ambassador was very much put out and said that I was no attaché despite the fact that I had my attaché’s case with me and I recall him speaking of good old Brommy and saying, “By God if good old Brommy had been sent down here we’d have the boys out of the dunghills and into the châteaux by Christmas!”

All this literary gossip however has nothing to do with my search for the real Spaniard which has been carried on all over Spain. I remember once in Navarre the proprietor of a hotel had a kind way of laying hold of my arm when he talked and not putting the drinks on the bill. The Real Spaniard, I thought. But a few days later passing through Aragon a man to whom I was talking on the train had a way of swaying back and forth in the aisle and steadying himself with an arm around my neck while he poured wine over me and over my wife’s dress. I spoke to him about the kind hotel keeper who had only laid his hand on my arm and had served the drinks in bottles. But this man said, “Oh don’t judge Spain by Navarre!”

So I didn’t.

In Galicia there were fishermen along the beach at La Coruña pulling in their boats with oxen; simple sturdy men, quite sober, who asked for nothing save a stick to poke the oxen. I was looking at them thinking, by George, I have found the real Spanish, and won’t this be a good one on old Brommy. When suddenly a British curate at my elbow said pleasantly enough, “Very Galician.”

In Madrid all my luggage was stolen, my pocket was picked, I was shot at by a priest, and arrested by the authorities who had a tip that I was Charles Levine. I was naturally becoming annoyed and said as much to my wife.

She was very soothing and said, “Never mind, dear, these are not the real Spaniards.” Just then a chap whom I had never met approached our little group and fired three shots at me point blank crying, “That for you, Paol no Uzcudun!” I explained to the poor fellow that I was no Paolino but agreed with Benchley that he was a ** and we were on the point of becoming fast friends and my wife was whispering to me that we had encountered a real Spaniard when it turned out quite by accident that the fellow was an Armenian and had never heard of Tex Rickard in his life.

And as I looked into her eyes and saw the truth gleaming there, I knew that my search too, like that of good old Brommy for the real French, had ended in the home.

I must say that I felt discouraged and was on the point of hiring me a parlor maid, a cook, and a chauffeur named Pilar, Concepción, and Isidoro respectively, to see if they would be the real thing like good old Brommy found, when picking up the Heraldo Madrid, I glanced over the Telefonos y Telegrafos and saw that thirty-six people had been drowned by falling into the sea off an autobús in Extremadura. Something told me that they were the real Spaniards and that they were all dead.

“Shall we go to Extremadura?” I asked my wife.

“Why, dear?”

“To find the real Spaniards,” I said, for that autobús accident haunted me.

“Hell no, dear,” my wife answered.

“Why the hell not, dear?”

“You are the real Spaniard,” my wife said softly and as I looked into her eyes and saw the truth gleaming there, I knew that my search too, like that of good old Brommy for the real French, had ended in the home.

** Anyone who has read any of Mr. Hemingway’s books will know the missing word that we have represented by these asterisks.