Vicente is completely preoccupied. His hands and body keep repeating the movements of a pass rather as a golfer might replay a putt that let him down.
A mobile phone rings. He looks up. It’s our film crew, calling to say their vehicle is stuck in traffic. Human traffic. The doorbell goes. A woman from Spanish television regards us anxiously. Did we know that Vicente had promised to appear on a live discussion programme in ten minutes’ time?
Vicente’s dresser shuts the door on her.
Vicente looks forlorn, well as forlorn as a bullfighter in a bejewelled suit worth $3000 can look. His face betrays the strain of a profession caught between the demands of ancient tradition and modern exploitation. As we shake hands he apologises. This weekend there is a lot of pressure on him. He is fighting again tomorrow and the night after in Alicante.
‘I’m playing with my life each night,’ he says, almost bitterly. And in his case it is probably true.
Five minutes to midnight in a small square in the heart of the old city. There isn’t room for that many people and those that are here are mainly local. They’re gathered around a tall, Disneyesque Aladdin, centrepiece of an Arabian Nights fantasy with prominent local politicians, nuns, and a bishop or two thrown in for good measure. It’s an elaborate and clever piece of work and those who created it are now busy making sure that they can destroy it just as cleverly. They move around the base of the figure poking an air-hole through here, laying a fuse there. One man is up a ladder at the back of the statue, sticking wires and paraffin bags up Aladdin’s backside.
The mood is serious and celebratory at the same time. I have the feeling that the general success of Fallas is considered more important than any single event. The groups compete with each other but only to make the whole festival better. Which is why this festival has been marked by high spirits without violence, drinking without fighting, noise without aggression. And tonight is perhaps the most precarious balancing act of all. Seven hundred bonfires are about to be lit across an urban area of a million people.
At midnight in our quiet square the local queen of the Fallas lights the fuse that starts the last act of this extraordinary festival. Lines of firecrackers and flame race towards Aladdin’s buttocks and other strategic flashpoints. For a while the figures prove resistant but gradually the flames take hold and the figures are stripped to their wooden frames and for a half-minute or more the surge of the fire is frighteningly intense.
We make our way towards the main square. Over the heads of the crowd by the market I can see Steven Spielberg’s glasses melting. At the end of one street fire licks round a Harlequin, at another, a Roman Emperor and several naked ladies are engulfed in flames.
It takes most of one hour to make our way the short distance to the main square. A figure of Gulliver fifty feet high towers over us and is duly ignited (this time via a main fuse which runs straight into his fly). As the final conflagration takes hold Gulliver’s head collapses, sending his rather soppy Hollywood-style grin crashing on to the street. The bomberos (firemen) spray the nearby palm trees as the flames leap and the heat intensifies and once again we hold our breath not knowing which way it will go.
Two-thirty in the morning on the streets of Valencia. The bulldozers and trucks are moving into the main square to remove the remains of Gulliver.
The brushes are revolving on a squadron of natty little cleaning vehicles. A line of orange-clad street-sweepers, with gleaming new brooms and shovels, stands ready to follow them.
Though the celebrations still go on, the party’s over. A sense of loss hangs in the smoke-shrouded air, a muted feeling of anti-climax, a sudden acknowledgement that the city of Valencia is dog-tired.
I know I shall miss being woken by les despertas, I shall miss being able to stroll round Spain’s third biggest city as if it were my own living-room, and when in the morning I hear the noise of a city returning to normal - the car alarms, the police sirens - I shall probably miss the explosions too.
There is something intoxicating and dangerous and reckless in the way the Spanish celebrate, which is what must have drawn Hemingway to their way of life. It is physical and hard and colourful and noisy and yet has a rare sense of historical continuity.
Throughout his adult life, with the exception of the darkest years of General Franco’s dictatorship, Hemingway kept coming back to Spain. In a drawer in the house in Ketchum, where he shot himself on 2 July 1961, were tickets to the Pamplona bullfights that were to begin a week later.
CHICAGO/MICHIGAN
‘Who’s that girl?’ Early photos of young Ernest confuse visitors at his birthplace.
Ernest Hall, Sheffield-born grandfather of Ernest (with weapon), Ursula and Marcelline.
The front of 339 Oak Park Avenue looks naked with its porch removed for Hemingway centenary restoration.
Marcelline, Madelaine, Clarence, Grace, Ursula and Ernest (still to come, Carol and Leicester). Oak Park 1906.
The Red Fox Inn, where Hemingway’s fishing mentor lived.
The public library on Mitchell Street, Petoskey. Here in 1919 Hemingway read the papers, borrowed books and gave speeches about his war experiences to delighted female audiences.
Windemere, the Hemingway holiday home today.
Horton Bay, Michigan, inspiration for Hemingway’s earliest published stories and very little changed.
Kewadin Casino, Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan - which earns 50 million dollars a year for the Chippewa tribe.
At a gun shop in rural Michigan I test drive a Wheatherby doublebarrelled over and under muzzle-loader and try to pretend I know what that all means. The array of weapons is fearsome, the people who sell them quite the opposite.
Picture postcard time. On Horton Creek, one of the shallow streams of north Michigan, Hemingway perfected his fishing technique and Palin abandoned his. You can almost hear the steelhead trout sighing with relief as my canoe comes towards them.
Crossing the Chicago River, leaving behind the glossy corporate skyscrapers on the less than glossy train to Oak Park.
Ernest and his first wife, Hadley Richardson. He was twenty-two when they married, twenty-eight when they divorced in Paris.
The oldest modern city in the world. Chicago at sunset from the ninety-sixth floor of the Hancock Center.
ITALY
Milan Central, my gateway to north Italy. Completed in 1931, with a 700-foot-long concourse that’s more like a cathedral. Decor is Art Nouveau with Fascist triumphalism thrown in.
Winged horses and mighty human athletes decorate the front of the station. On his first night young Hemingway walked beneath the soaring glass roof of the Galleria - the world’s first great shopping mall.
Many subsequent nights, recovering after his injury, were spent falling in love with his American nurse, one of the few women known to have jilted Ernest.
The wounded hero, Milan 1918.