Ernest Hemingway - Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, The

“Go on up, John,” I said. “I want to telephone.”

I went over to the booth and called the same number I had given the waiter.

“Hello? Pepé?”

A thin-lipped voice came over the phone. “ ¿Qué tal Enrique? ”

“Listen, Pepé, did you pick up a certain Luis Delgado at Chicote’s?”

“ Sí, hombre, sí. Sin novedad . Without trouble.”

“He doesn’t know anything about the waiter?”

“No, hombre , no.”

“Then don’t tell him. Tell him I denounced him then, will you? Nothing about the waiter.”

“Why when it will make no difference? He is a spy. He will be shot. There is no choice in the matter.”

“I know,” I said. “But it makes a difference.”

“As you want, hombre . As you want. When shall I see thee?”

“Lunch tomorrow. We have some meat.”

“And whisky before. Good, hombre , good.”

“ Salud , Pepé, and thank you.”

“ Salud , Enrique. It is nothing. Salud .”

It was a strange and very deadly voice and I never got used to hearing it, but as I walked up the stairs now, I felt much better.

All we old clients of Chicote’s had a sort of feeling about the place. I knew that was why Luis Delgado had been such a fool as to go back there. He could have done his business some place else. But if he was in Madrid he had to go there. He had been a good client as the waiter had said and we had been friends. Certainly any small acts of kindness you can do in life are worth doing. So I was glad I had called my friend Pepé at Seguridad headquarters because Luis Delgado was an old client of Chicote’s and I did not wish him to be disillusioned or bitter about the waiters there before he died.

The Butterfly and the Tank

ON THIS EVENING I WAS WALKING HOME from the censorship office to the Florida Hotel and it was raining. So about halfway home I got sick of the rain and stopped into Chicote’s for a quick one. It was the second winter of shelling in the siege of Madrid and everything was short including tobacco and people’s tempers and you were a little hungry all the time and would become suddenly and unreasonably irritated at things you could do nothing about such as the weather. I should have gone on home. It was only five blocks more, but when I saw Chicote’s doorway I thought I would get a quick one and then do those six blocks up the Gran Via through the mud and rubble of the streets broken by the bombardment.

The place was crowded. You couldn’t get near the bar and all the tables were full. It was full of smoke, singing, men in uniform, and the smell of wet leather coats, and they were handing drinks over a crowd that was three deep at the bar.

A waiter I knew found a chair from another table and I sat down with a thin, white-faced, Adam’s-appled German I knew who was working at the censorship and two other people I did not know. The table was in the middle of the room a little on your right as you go in.

You couldn’t hear yourself talk for the singing and I ordered a gin and Angostura and put it down against the rain. The place was really packed and everybody was very jolly; maybe getting just a little bit too jolly from the newly made Catalan liquor most of them were drinking. A couple of people I did not know slapped me on the back and when the girl at our table said something to me, I couldn’t hear it and said, “Sure.”

She was pretty terrible looking now I had stopped looking around and was looking at our table; really pretty terrible. But it turned out, when the waiter came, that what she had asked me was to have a drink. The fellow with her was not very forceful looking but she was forceful enough for both of them. She had one of those strong, semi-classical faces and was built like a lion tamer; and the boy with her looked as though he ought to be wearing an old school tie. He wasn’t though. He was wearing a leather coat just like all the rest of us. Only it wasn’t wet because they had been there since before the rain started. She had on a leather coat too and it was becoming to the sort of face she had.

By this time I was wishing I had not stopped into Chicote’s but had gone straight on home where you could change your clothes and be dry and have a drink in comfort on the bed with your feet up, and I was tired of looking at both of these young people. Life is very short and ugly women are very long and sitting there at the table I decided that even though I was a writer and supposed to have an insatiable curiosity about all sorts of people, I did not really care to know whether these two were married, or what they saw in each other, or what their politics were, or whether he had a little money, or she had a little money, or anything about them. I decided they must be in the radio. Any time you saw really strange looking civilians in Madrid they were always in the radio. So to say something I raised my voice above the noise and asked, “You in the radio?”

“We are,” the girl said. So that was that. They were in the radio.

“How are you comrade?” I said to the German.

“Fine. And you?”

“Wet,” I said, and he laughed with his head on one side.

“You haven’t got a cigarette?” he asked. I handed him my next to the last pack of cigarettes and he took two. The forceful girl took two and the young man with the old school tie face took one.

“Take another,” I shouted.

“No thanks,” he answered and the German took it instead.

“Do you mind?” he smiled.

“Of course not,” I said. I really minded and he knew it. But he wanted the cigarettes so badly that it did not matter. The singing had died down momentarily, or there was a break in it as there is sometimes in a storm, and we could all hear what we said.

“You been here long?” the forceful girl asked me. She pronounced it bean as in bean soup.

“Off and on,” I said.

“We must have a serious talk,” the German said. “I want to have a talk with you. When can we have it?”

“I’ll call you up,” I said. This German was a very strange German indeed and none of the good Germans liked him. He lived under the delusion that he could play the piano, but if you kept him away from pianos he was all right unless he was exposed to liquor, or the opportunity to gossip, and nobody had even been able to keep him away from those two things yet.

Gossip was the best thing he did and he always knew something new and highly discreditable about anyone you could mention in Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, and other political centers.

Just then the singing really started in again, and you cannot gossip very well shouting, so it looked like a dull afternoon at Chicote’s and I decided to leave as soon as I should have bought a round myself.

Just then it started. A civilian in a brown suit, a white shirt, black tie, his hair brushed straight back from a rather high forehead, who had been clowning around from table to table, squirted one of the waiters with a flit gun. Everybody laughed except the waiter who was carrying a tray full of drinks at the time. He was indignant.

“ No hay derecho ,” the waiter said. This means, “You have no right to do that,” and is the simplest and the strongest protest in Spain.

The flit gun man, delighted with his success, and not seeming to give any importance to the fact that it was well into the second year of the war, that he was in a city under siege where everyone was under a strain, and that he was one of only four men in civilian clothes in the place, now squirted another waiter.

I looked around for a place to duck to. This waiter, also, was indignant and the flit gun man squirted him twice more, lightheartedly. Some people still thought it was funny, including the forceful girl. But the waiter stood, shaking his head. His lips were trembling. He was an old man and he had worked in Chicote’s for ten years that I knew of.