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Papa, they called him. A young old man. A voice and its layout. I, for my part, first met Ernest Hemingway in a small bar in Madrid. The ceilings were sloping, rounded, the establishment itself below the street level, nestled. You had the sensation that life began in a cave and you’d returned to the source. I found him sipping poison at the source.

A complex character. Papa complexity. Pleasantly odd to be witness to this complexity, to meet a human being who so much resembles a vortex: something brilliant, some musky luminescence about him always. Charisma? Yet light seemed to lose its variety, its shape, its color, the closer it was to his face. A grey being, a configuration of devices both authored and unauthored.

I was immediately taken by the effects of his presence in the room. I dare say it was difficult to hear him speak above the din he produced around him. And so, I chanced upon the question: how do you greet a person of this stature? A legend. An angel made almost of asphalt and bronze, he was so hard, unapologetic. A man who’d been murdered by commentary. He knew this, he would later confess, because he had already died many times. He had died on a rescue in the Great War. Discovering futility, and its implacable scope, full and more full with shrapnel. He had died when he met his nurse, and died again when they asked him to rise from his bed, where she knew him. He had died when Spain caught fire. Died when they called him Papa, though he would learn to enjoy its resonance, like some new code of his own invention. He was a man beset with death, so he knew it was death when the biographers got to him. Death because it was necessary. How do you greet such a man?

You don’t. He does the greeting, allows you to be seen, forgives you for having come. Tells the barista to cure you with an aperitif. You simply drink, try not to spill, not to color the mood too much. It has to be black and white, and maybe a hint of bronze underneath. You could taste the scene as a grey bas-relief. Indelible as bedrock, warm as summer fog. But even then, no color. Air like the pages that built him. Breath of the cavedwelling, frozen. In summer fog.

I told myself to batten down, be still, prepare to acquire the radio frequencies for a black and white world, grey blood. Be honest. Fit the code. I said nothing for two days. Two days ruminating, bovine, and then we met again. Again in the curling confines of the small subterranean refuge. One of the famed ‘cuevas’, or cave bars. This time I spoke.

The reader in me couldn’t help spilling. 'Cuevas', of course, means not only caves, plural, but also ‘you dig’, as in get deeper and more filthy. Closer to the source, perhaps. The cuevas were dimly lit, often soggy with smoke, but somehow clear. Hollows. A breach in the order of time and the world. Allowing for a small burst of liberty from the vague and inconsequent motions of the street. These were the hollows that made an individual. It seemed a convergence of place and meaning.

A silent explosion, he said... intensely gruff, surprisingly not too indifferent. The air gleamed for a moment with the frail daring of color.

Then, he receded. And I realized, I had found my way into the bronze. I could see the contours and cavities, the textual air of the cuevas that built him. Again, I had the sensation that life began in a cave, and I’d returned to the source. I found him sipping poison at the source. The careful graphite of his scratchings had stained the walls. You could read him there, if you had a drink in you. You could read something unsaid, unsayable, but precise and written into the walls.

He wrote across everything, wrote with his silence, his breath, the dinge of his gaze. There was something in him that had the strange effect of making the air both cleaner and somehow gritty. We had almost conversed; I felt like blank paper. I would turn to the documentation. Do a new check on his background. I plunged into the texts, began to read his fiction as if I were learning a foreign language. I was coming repeatedly face to face with clarity without clarity, meaning without explanation. Frustrating subtlety.

Then, in the third week of our acquaintance, after two readings of The Sun and one of Death, switching between Arms and “White Elephants”, scatterling myths of all measure, I noticed a small brush of lavender blossom and one iris clumped into an empty bottle, in the corner of our cueva. He entered, and I wondered if such delicate beauties could survive his stare. He quickly found the new detail, and I could see that he loved the flowers, was already mourning their frailty. By the time he reached the table, he was composed and waiting for bourbon to come over. It was the last time I sat with him... I would never manage to accept his invitation to go shooting.

There would be much work still to push through. The clear air of his words, the reading, finding myself on pages I had lived and never spoken. He had a way of getting you into his words, making you feel that you were inventing his story and not he.

He would tell you a tale, and instantly you’d believe him. Not only would you believe him, but you’d hear his voice as if you and he shared some corroborating proof of the facts. Then, you’d be sure it was lie. Perhaps a beautiful lie, but not solidly real. You’d be certain he lied not to hide any shameful truth, but rather to draw himself out into the open, become all the more apparent, claim defiantly: I am this way, regardless of what the facts might tell you. And then, of course, you would understand that everything was encrypted, that this was a masterfully private man, and he would give you only what you needed, growling.

And so I knew I could not be his biographer. There would be something, some small corner of a book, perhaps, and the book would be written when the writer was ready to write it, and I was feeling that my readiness was false.

In the end, it was clear: I could only hope, at some later date, to find the words that would allow me to say that maybe he had found the source, or he’d learned to live with the pain of not finding it, and that was what he had written about. To say that he had been careful, and he had found all of the words, and he had not polished them too, too far from what he believed them to be, and he had managed to make himself whole.

So let me try to lay claim to having tried most sincerely to talk about a man I knew, if only briefly, in a deeply frustrating always total and incomplete way. Let me say that I told you about a human being without laying claim to his humanity, and that I think he may have wanted it that way.

[from Embers, by Joseph Robertson]

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