Feasts

by borevidal

Summary:

More snapshots of Hemingway's life in Paris.

Notes:

• For Mary_the_gardener.

Thank you for the lovely prompts! It was impossible to only pick one so I picked two, which still feels like too few. Thank you for the chance to visit Hem’s Paris! And Happy Yuletide!

Chapter 1: The Frying Pan

One afternoon one of the good fishermen who fished daily along the Seine saw me watching the fishing with interest. He offered to lend me a second pole he had brought for a friend who was not coming. I was timid to become involved in it at first but he lent it to me with such good nature that I could not refuse. I watched how he placed himself over the water and tried to do what he did. After a very little time I felt the fish tug at the end of my line.

I had caught one of the goujon with my borrowed pole and I was very pleased.

“You must be sure to cook it with lots of butter,” my friend the fisherman said, using the French expression. “It is good with butter and best with butter and lemon.”  

I nodded. I knew that I would cook it myself and that I would enjoy the fresh flesh of the fish and lots of butter with it. It was good to carry my goujon home through the streets of the quarter thinking how I had caught it myself and how we would have a feast that night.

I went up the stairs carrying the fish. “Tonight we are going to eat well,” I said to Hadley. I held up the fish that I had caught.

“Tatie!” Hadley said. “Where did you catch it?”

“In the Seine. It is called goujon,” I said to her. “To cook it I need butter and lemon and a strong, sharp knife, and a frying pan.” I knew how to cook the goujon because I had caught many fish before, on boats and in streams. When I caught fish in those days I would wrap the fish with a piece of bacon thinly sliced and cook them in a pan over a campfire. The fish would sizzle in the pan five minutes until the eyes were opaque, and then I would turn the fish to cook five minutes more. I used to eat the fish with my fingers. It was good fish and eating it was good in the crisp cold air with the heat from the fire on your face. Food tasted best when you worked hard at catching it, with your mind as well as with your hands. So I knew that the fish I had caught that day in the Seine would taste good, bones and all.

“That will be wonderful,” Hadley said. “And it’s so fresh. Only I wish you had told me about it so that I would know.”

I wanted to explain to her that you cannot know for certain if the fish will come. Fishing has its rules and secrets as all really honorable things have. It would have been a breach of them to speak to her of the fish in advance. If I had told her that there would be fish I could not have been certain of the fish as I was certain of it now. I wanted to tell her all these things but instead I stood there holding the fish in my hand. It felt cool and very slick to the touch after the long walk home.

“It’s a lovely fish, Tatie,” Hadley said. She said it with real admiration. I felt that I should have said something. In the moment after she had spoken the last time, I had left the silence to grow too large. It was not good to let the silences grow too large between us. When the silences grew too large between us, sometimes in bed when I lay awake at night afterwards, that would feel like silence too. “I will get some butter for you to fry it in.”

“It will be very good to eat,” I said. “It is an excellent fish.”

She brought the pan and the butter and a lemon. I put the goujon into the pan with the butter and the lemon and fried it, five minutes on each side. The whole kitchen smelled of the flesh of the fish frying in the hot butter. Afterwards the whole apartment smelled of the hot fish.

Hadley set the table and we sat down together and ate the fish. It was good to eat the fish. It was very warm and the bones crunched against your tongue. We ate the fish together and cleaned the pan afterwards.

“It’s very good, Tatie,” Hadley said. “And to think you caught it yourself in the Seine.”

“Yes,” I said. I tried to put into words how it was good to think of the Seine as a river in which men with pensions and men with an interest in fishing could go and fish. I was still too new to Paris not to be surprised that the Seine was a river in which you could catch fish like other rivers. At the time when I thought of it it seemed surprising to me that there was still good fishing to be done there, when really it was the most natural thing in the world.

“I don’t know why I never think of there being fish in the river,” Hadley said. “But all the same I’m glad there are.” It was the thing I had not been able to put into words.

“And they taste of the river,” I said.

“Yes,” Hadley said. “Of the river and the life in it.”

The flesh of the fish was sweet and clean and it was very good to eat with butter, even if the apartment smelled of it for days afterwards. It was a good smell. It was a smell of life and of the Seine, and when I did not notice it in the apartment any longer I was sad although I could not explain why.

Chapter 2: Valises

Notes:

This owes a considerable debt to his description of a writer's response to the loss of a suitcase of his manuscripts in the unpublished story "The Strange Country," but I also took some liberties so that this was not just "The Strange Country" over again! I did feel that what he said he did in the apartment was probably true, so I kept it.

When she arrived at the train station in Lausanne Hadley was crying. I told her that she should not cry, that nothing in the world could be so bad that it was worth crying like that. But then she told me about the manuscripts. All my drafts of all my stories and all the carbon copies of everything that I had written. She had put them all into manila folders to bring to me as a surprise. And the suitcase was gone. 

At first I was sure that she could not have meant the carbon copies too. Although we had both spoken to one another in plain understandable words I was sure that she could not have meant it. I did not want to believe that the carbon copies could be lost.

She had gone to get Evian water at the station and when she got back to the suitcase it was no longer there. She had tried to explain to the gendarmerie about the suitcase's being stolen. It had involved a good deal of showing that she was not a crook herself and that she really had such a suitcase, and were the papers of political importance? In the end an inspecteur de police had followed her onto the train, she said, to inquire if madame had lost any more papers. 

I called my friend who worked at the newspaper with me and told him about what had happened. He agreed that I should go and see about it and that he would take care of things for me while I went. I bought a train ticket, third class, and rushed back to Paris on the train. All the time that I was on the train I was trying not to think too much about what might be lost. I got a bottle of white wine and drank it in little gulps, barely tasting it. It is a good countryside between Lausanne and the Gare Lyon but I did not see any of it as the train snaked through it. The images of the countryside did not catch in my eyes any more than a reflection catches in the surface of a river.

The train whistled and huffed steam through its smokestack and hurried along towards Paris. It was a long ride and trying not to let myself think about the manuscripts made it even longer. I could not read or concentrate and I could barely eat. I bought a little sausage and I chewed a few mouthfuls of it but I had to put it aside. I tried not to think about all my stories and all the work I had done to get them exactly as I wanted them. I felt sure that there had been some mistake about the carbon copies because I could see them all so clearly in my mind, in the desk, with its pencil case and little box for stamps. I felt certain that they must be in the desk. 

I inquired about the suitcase at the train station but of course it was not there and the porters only shrugged at me in sympathy. They asked if what was lost had been very valuable and I did not know how to answer them without sounding like a madman. I was determined not to be a madman yet.

I went back to the apartment and climbed the stairs and slid back the lock and looked around the apartment.

When you are looking for something a place can play tricks on you and not show you immediately the thing that you are there to see. But I knew this and I let the apartment see that I knew it. I did not look through everything deliberately but waited to see what it would show me of what was there. But then after a while I became impatient and I started to look everywhere. I knew the drawer and the places where I kept my papers and I looked there last of all. At first I did not know that what I felt was fear, but soon afterwards I knew it. 

I kept telling myself that they could not all be gone because I could see them so clearly in my mind. I could see the manuscripts and the carbon copies and all the envelopes with their return mailing addresses and the red sealing wax that I used to seal letters and packages with, and the little box where I kept the stamps, and the international postage coupons that I enclosed to pay for the returns. I could see them all clearly and at first I did not understand what I was seeing when I looked at the desk. It was so empty. Even my paper clips in their cardboard box were gone. I felt as though I could not breathe when I saw that there really were no folders with typed copies and no folders with originals and no folders with carbon copies. 

I locked the door of the cupboard and went into the next room which was the bedroom and lay down on the bed and put a pillow between my legs and my arms around another pillow. All my stories that I had worked on so hard. I knew that I could not do them again. I had gotten them just how I wanted them and now when I read them I marveled at how I had ever done them. I lay there with the pillow between my legs and the pillow in my arms and I knew despair, real despair. I could see the dust on the bedclothes. I lay there a long time and felt absolutely nothing. I knew that time was passing because it began to be dark. 

I was frightened to lie there all night in despair with the pillow between my legs. I had never done a thing like that or needed to do it, and I did not know what else I would do or need to do if I kept on in that way. So I went and got a good stiff drink and drank it. It went down smoothly. And then I got another one and drank that. I thought very simply that I was not a writer any longer. It was as simple as that. I did not think then about the two stories that were out because I had sent a copy to Lincoln Steffens or the other that had been rejected. Goodbye to all that, I thought. I did not like to be in the apartment with the empty desk so I went out to a bad cafe that I knew and ordered a fine a l'eau. I looked frightening. I thought of a gambler I had met once and how he had looked when he wagered everything and it was gone. Nobody wanted to go near him, he looked so terrible.

But just as what I had been doing was much finer than gambling, what had happened was more sudden and harder to explain. It was only one suitcase but it was everything, too. I sat there and thought, I am not a writer any longer. Isn't it a funny thing not to be a writer. I sipped my fine. There were people in the cafe, talking to each other. The waiter knew not to talk to me. I looked all around at the people and I thought, it isn't of any importance to me what they do, because I am finished. There is nothing in them for me to take. After another few drinks it was a relief. I did not need to remember anything that happened. Not to me or to anybody. Another drink and I started to be happy about it. It started to be funny. I think I must still have looked very terrible. I did not tell Hadley what I had done in the apartment and in the cafe. I went back to her and I did not mention anything that had happened after I knew the manuscripts were gone. 

"It was just as you said," I said. "Now don't let's talk about it any more." 

I could see that she wanted to tell me that she was sorry again, and I could not bear to hear it another time. I remembered how to make my face look terrible. So then she was silent. It started as a bad silence but by the end I told myself that it was becoming one of our good silences. In those days I did not know when I was lying.