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2 Making a Mess of Manhood in Hemingway’s “The Capital of the World” Desultory, peripatetic, “The Capital of the World” is less a story than a series of anecdotes. It sketches in a motley cast of characters—a lecherous and cowardly matador, an anarchist, two priests, two “houseworn” prostitutes, a group of waiters—loosely associated with the Pension Luarca in Madrid. On these characters the narrative voice bestows an interest that is dispassionate even for Hemingway: “Upstairs the matador who was ill was lying face down on his bed alone. The matador who was no longer a novelty was sitting looking out of his window preparatory to walking out to the café. The matador who was a coward had the older sister of Paco in his room with him and was trying to get her to do something which she was laughingly refusing to do.”1 Isolatoes all, tagged and caricatured rather than fully realized, these characters have little to do with each other beyond the kind of near-random collision here described between Paco’s sister (a maid) and the “matador who was a coward.” When the tale’s dramatic action finally resolves on the young waiter Paco, it does so with the same kind of casual abruptness with which the narrator above shifts from matador to matador. One minute Paco’s sister is fending off the cowardly matador ; the next minute Paco gets to be ‘matador’ in a deadly kitchen game. The dishwasher Enrique wields a chair tipped with heavy meat knives to represent the bull; Paco, indulging a longstanding fantasy, swings an apron to represent a cape. Minutes later, the knife/horn having severed his femoral artery, Paco is dead. Laconic to the end, the narrative voice seems determinedly uninvolved as it modulates from the surreal (Paco felt his life “go out of him as dirty water empties from a bathtub when the plug is drawn” [37]) to the medically precise (“A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe”). The closing paragraphs devote almost as much space to the Greta Garbo movie then playing in Madrid. By dying, the last sentence informs us, Paco had “not even had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week” (38). Cold ironies abound. What is least worthy of notice : Paco’s inconsequential death or the inconsequential disappointment that would presumably have become Paco’s had he lived? Making a Mess of Manhood in Hemingway’s “The Capital of the World”  At first blush “all Madrid”—the collectivity whose disappointment death prevents Paco from sharing—sounds both grandiloquent and sloppy. But the words actually resonate in complicated ways through the story. The phrase might have reference to the story’s desultory piling-up of many fragmentary lives, so that the Pension Luarca embodies a representative slice of human life in Spain; or it might imply a bogus commonality laughably at odds with the isolated characters; or it might imply that the commonality (all Madrid disappointed on account of a movie!) is precisely what is laughable. The issue is worth pondering at length because it bears directly on what is for our purposes the key concern of the story: the representativeness of Paco’s attempts to ‘play at’ being a matador, and thus a man. “Madrid is full of boys named Paco,” the narrative begins, and this Paco, repeating the gestures, suertes, and bravery he has seen so many times in the ring and in his imagination, might stand for some general condition of boyhood. There is clearly a sense in which the story can be assimilated to what many would still consider to be the quintessential Hemingway theme: boys undergoing initiations into manhood, whereupon they learn that manhood is exceedingly dangerous and fit only for the very brave. Such an interpretation centers the tale amid what seem to be the certitudes of Hemingway’s views on masculinity: men desire autonomy, self-control, courage, grace under pressure. A torero, says Enrique, can “control his fear so that he can work the bull” (35), even though the bull represents sheer terror: its horns “rip like a knife, they stab like a bayonet, and they kill like a club.” No wonder then that scholars have extolled the representative virtues of the bullfighter in Hemingway’s work. The “image of the matador,” as Lawrence R. Broer writes, is a “symbol of the best a man can be in a violent and irrational world—a...

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