Slush Pile #3: Hemingway Brought Me To Spain

Bachata, beaches, and a Dominican papi brought me to the Caribbean islands. Family, food, and colors brought me to Asia. Hemingway brought me to Spain. It began like the story of any lonely child hungry for the world. When I was 10, I’d already made my way through most of the cornerstone classics- Dumas, the big Shakespeare plays, a decent bit of Henry James, Dickens. At 13, I dove into America- Edith Wharton, Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston. (This may tell you about the amount of friends and social skills I had at this time). I didn’t understand half of it, but I knew it was America and it was more than Shoreview, MN, and I was so, so hungry.

At 15 I discovered Hemingway. I’d worked my way through “Old Man And The Sea” the year prior and chewed through it, untasting, like any virgin teenager, but when we were assigned “The Sun Also Rises” in Mrs. Nesset’s class in Honors English 10, I fell in love. I fell in love like I did with Tupac. The feeling of touching something I didn’t understand but knowing that finally I was touching something real and vital, in the instinctive way a hungry man salivates when he smells food. I saw Tupac and Hemingway in the same way. Violently self-destructive in their quest for masculinity, trying to hide so much while revealing the most, irreparably scarred by different wars, stumbling upon beautiful moments of perfect clarity with a genius that burned sanity away. 

The only way to read Hemingway is until your eyes blur, whether from continuous sips of whiskey or dried contacts, I don’t remember. Nabokov said that “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” I re-read “Old Man and the Sea” in Havana on the malecon the day after being caught in a thunderstorm on Santa Maria beach with a beautiful Cubano I watched the sun set with, colors warm as the ocean. I read The Sun Also Rises three times, front to back. The Sun Also Rises is a great book not because they captured the youth of a time, but because it captured the loss of innocence. And it’s fucking funny. I’m saving the fourth read for San Sebastian and Pamplona. I started re-reading his short stories as well as “For Whom The Bell Tolls” when I hit Valencia. 

I’m not on a pilgrimage following his footsteps. But it was that initial draw of something vital and real that Hemingway brought to a high schooler who had yet to get drunk, that made it a goal of mine for the last five years to live in Spain. And now I’m living in Granada, sitting at a bar, asking the bartender for another vermut ahora. 

Shitty discreet iphone photo three drinks in