Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin Page B

is being put through here and in amongst the rubble and the electricity pylons is a ten-foot-high metal star, leaning at an angle, surrounded by weeds. A plaque beside it marks it as a monument to the International Brigade, those volunteers from outside Spain who came over to fight against Franco and Fascism in the war of 1936-9.
    The Spanish Civil War, the second of three wars in which Hemingway saw action, and the one which produced his novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, was the most politically committed time of his life. He wrote commentary and helped raise finance for a propaganda film, shot by a Dutchman, Joris Ivens, and called
Spanish Earth
.
    Orson Welles, enlisted to record the commentary, wanted to change some of the lines which he thought sounded unduly pompous. At a viewing of the film, described by Welles in
Cahiers du Cinema
, he and Hemingway came to blows, going at each other with chairs and fists, as the armies fought it out on the screen in front of them.
    The two American heavyweights were reconciled over a bottle of whisky, and though Welles still gets the credit in some of the early prints, it is Hemingway’s flat, harsh monotone that accompanies the film.
    I t’s half past eight on a Sunday morning and in the hard dry sunlight a group of prostitutes is working a corner of the Casa de Campo, one of the great straggling parks of Madrid.

    Not that that’s why I’m there, though my business in the park at this time is essentially macho. In amongst the prostitutes and the pine trees is an Escuela de Tauromaquia, a school of bullfighting.
    Yesterday I witnessed the care and attention that goes into raising bulls to be killed. Today I am to witness the equal amount of care and attention that goes into killing them.
    The school, considered the best in the country, has its own miniature ring and whitewashed outbuildings, on which are painted the breeders’ marks, which will be found branded on every bull. They are sometimes letters, sometimes symbols and have an ancient cabalistic feel to them.
    Inside the ring the class is assembling. All boys (though there is one potential female matador), mostly in their teens with the quick eyes and lean, combative stance of lads from the streets. But appearances can be deceptive, and one eighteen-year-old, Fabian, turns out to be from a Mexican family who had enough money to send him to school in Texas in the hope of curing his desire to become a bullfighter.
    That didn’t work and he has not only been attending classes here for three years, he has also dispatched fifteen or sixteen bulls already. He shrugs off my incredulity. One of the top three bullfighters in Spain, El Juli, is only seventeen years old, he says, and smaller than him.
    A portly older man enters the ring and calls the boys together. They address him as
maestro
and I assume that one day before his stomach grew he was as light and lithe as the boys he’s teaching. He picks up two
banderillas
, the spiked sticks which are placed in between the bull’s shoulder blades as it charges, and begins to demonstrate the moves.
    The bull is, I’m relieved to see, not flesh and blood, but a set of horns and a padded cushion fixed to a bicycle wheel. One boy races this contraption fast across the ring and another has to go close enough to drop the barbed prongs exactly parallel to each other in precisely the right spot. Nine out of ten times they fail, but, as Fabian points out, only one or two of this class of thirty might be good enough to even contemplate fighting professionally.
    Under Fabian’s guidance I am allowed to try some moves with the cape, pink on one side and gold on the other, with which the matador tries to tire the bull in the second stage of a fight. The first thing that strikes me is how heavy it is, heavy enough, of course, to maintain its shape in all weather conditions.
    Fabian corrects my posture, emphasising the importance of the strut, of thrusting the hips forward, of staring the bull