Hemingway, Jennifer Lawrence and a Jesuit Walk into a Bar
Sophia wipes down the bar at the Inn1. The bar is quiet. But she knows that could change any minute. The door bursts open. It’s Ernest Hemingway.
HEMINGWAY: Buenas tardes!
SOPHIA: Welcome to the Inn at the End of the World. What can I get you, señor Hemingway?
HEMINGWAY: You know me then. I would like oysters with their strong taste of the sea. And a cold white wine.
SOPHIA: Something to make you lose the empty feeling, to be happy again and to make plans?
HEMINGWAY: [eyeing her up and down] So you’ve read A Moveable Feast. You remind me of my last mistress, Adriana. Tall, coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles.
SOPHIA: I remind men of many things. What brings you to the end of the world, señor?
HEMINGWAY: A double-barreled shotgun. Things go bad gradually. And then suddenly. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hated very much to leave it. But recently I found a young lady to shoot with – ah, here she is. Venga, guapa!
The door opens. Jennifer Lawrence walks in. She is flushed with walking in the wind.
HEMINGWAY: Sophia, this is Jennifer. Best girl at shooting I’ve been with since the Battle of Madrid.
SOPHIA: What are you hunting?
JENNIFER: We’re just shooting clays.
HEMINGWAY: She’ll come round. Isn’t she a fine filly, Sophia? [He puts his big arm around her. She leans in stiffly.] Have some oysters and this fine albariño, Jennifer.
SOPHIA: Many of our guests here read your Old Man and the Sea. What is it like to be a writer?
HEMINGWAY: There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
JENNIFER: You seem to enjoy blood.
HEMINGWAY: No. I looked, all my life, for men who showed courage. Grace under pressure. To show that, often blood must spill. Look at Juan Belmonte – how many horns did he take in the bull ring?
JENNIFER: The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
HEMINGWAY: What have I done to deserve this? Drinking with two beautiful women who know how to read?
SOPHIA: Grace usually comes to the undeserving.
HEMINGWAY: Let’s drink to that! Arriba, abajo, pa’ fuera, pa’ dentro! [They all drain their glasses]
JENNIFER: Lord, I needed that. I’m saddle sore. Ernest picked me up at the airport with two horses.
HEMINGWAY: I ride for the same reason I write standing up. Otherwise writing and travel broaden your ass, if not your mind.
JENNIFER: I broadened my mind when I got out of Kentucky. But the first thing that changed my mind politically was when Tina Fey in 30 Rock said, “I’m not a crazy liberal. I just think people should drive hybrid cars.”
HEMINGWAY: I haven’t read 30 Rock. But any bureaucrat who tells a man what car he must drive should be taken out and shot at dawn.
Jennifer rolls her eyes at Sophia; Sophia smiles. The door opens. A man with black hair, beard, and dark piercing eyes enters.
SOPHIA: Welcome, Padre. We were expecting you. What do you lack?
IGNATIUS: Buenas tardes, señorita Sophia. Que gusto verte de nuevo!
SOPHIA: Padre, this is señor Hemingway and señorita Jennifer. And this is St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits.
HEMINGWAY: Join us, padre. This is a good cold albariño.
IGNATIUS: Gracias. So, you are Señor Hemingway. I have been reading The Sun Also Rises with great interest.
HEMINGWAY: Not my best. I was just getting started. Why that one?
IGNATIUS: Two reasons. I wanted to understand what you were looking for - and I am a Basque.
HEMINGWAY: I could tell from your face. But tell me, padre, what was I looking for?
IGNATIUS: The same things I was as a young man. Glory. Honor. And the love of women.
JENNIFER: But you’re a priest!
IGNATIUS: I started out as a soldier. I trained; I learned the arts of war. I dressed well, I danced, I womanized. I brooked no insult. And I fought well. Until one day, at the age of 30, a French cannonball broke both my legs.
HEMINGWAY: You go to war, think you’re immortal. I took a mortar round in Italy at age eighteen. I learned I wasn’t.
IGNATIUS: I was still so vain I wanted a second operation so my legs would still look good in hose. Like you, señor Hemingway, I fell in love in the hospital.
HEMINGWAY: Yeah. My nurse. My first great love, Hadley.
IGNATIUS: I wanted to read books of chivalry, like Don Quixote, but my sister only brought me De Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxony. So I fell in love with God.
HEMINGWAY: Strange for a soldier. I’m listening.
IGNATIUS: I went to Cataluña, spent a night before the altar, hung up my sword and dagger, and spent a year in a cave at Manresa.
SOPHIA: That’s where you wrote the Spiritual Exercises, right?
HEMINGWAY: These women are readers, padre.
IGNATIUS: That is right, Sophia. Have you tried them?
SOPHIA: Well, I’ve thought about it. But I’m so busy keeping bar here. I’m trying to save up for a house.
IGNATIUS: Take your time. Teresa of Avila will have a one week retreat up in the hills soon if you want to try a baby step.
SOPHIA: Hmm. I’ll think about it. Anyone want to try today’s langostino?
HEMINGWAY: Si, señorita! And let´s move on to whiskey, shall we? Bring a bottle of your best, guapa. I’m going to interrogate our Basque priest here. [He winks at Jennifer.] Padre, I hear your Jesuits have been up to all sorts of skullduggery after your death. Inquisitors, advisors to bloody kings, helping Marxist guerillas in the Americas; one of your boys is finally pope and justifying all sorts of casuistry that must have you spinning in your grave!
IGNATIUS: Ernesto, you served in the Army, no?
HEMINGWAY: I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.
IGNATIUS: Then you will know that in an army there are brave men and cowards, true men and false, and everything in between.
HEMINGWAY: Indeed, padre. This whiskey is good, señorita.
SOPHIA: It’s bourbon. Pappy Van Winkle for Papa. But, padre, as a missionary army, yours seems to have conquered more territory than any other.
IGNATIUS: God granted us good men to send out: my friend Xavier in India, Valignano in Japan, Ricci in China, Pierre Jean-de-Smet to the Plains Indians in America, Claver with the slaves in Colombia. They led thousands of others.
JENNIFER: I liked Jeremy Irons in the Mission movie. Was there truth to that story?
IGNATIUS: I don’t watch films, but I have been told it’s one of the better ones. In our reductions our order got permission to defend the Guarani against the slave traders. So perhaps some combination of Irons and De Niro captures what happened.
HEMINGWAY: War is a bad business. About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
IGNATIUS: My dear Ernesto, you aimed all your life to write one true sentence. That is one of the falsest you have ever uttered.
HEMINGWAY: How so, padre?
IGNATIUS: You may have felt good after your many adulteries. How did your wives feel? And your children?
HEMINGWAY: I wanted to live life to the fullest, padre. What else is there?
IGNATIUS: I agree. We must live life and live it abundantly. The only way to do that is to give it away.
JENNIFER: Sounds like a recipe for unhappiness. I agree with Ernest. Take what you can now.
IGNATIUS: Oh, señorita, I understand you. I thought the same when I was young. Ask Ernesto here how it ended for him.
HEMINGWAY: I admit it was not pretty. I was drinking a bit much. Mary and I fought. All the time. I had gone through electro-shock therapy for depression. It took me a week to produce one very lousy paragraph. I knew then – life had taken my only reason for living. So…I bit down on the barrels of my twelve-guage and pulled the trigger.
SOPHIA: But you are the man who wrote “a man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
HEMINGWAY: I could no longer fight or… make love like I used to. But to no longer write? It was too much.
IGNATIUS: Of course it was. You were alone. Note the first-person plural, Ernesto, in the writer from whom you took those words. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
HEMINGWAY: Yeah. Why the we?
IGNATIUS: Because we fight with brothers alongside us. And even if every human brother falls, our great captain will not. He already took the fall.
JENNIFER: I heard all that heaven and hell stuff in Kentucky, padre. I outgrew it.
HEMINGWAY: To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.
JENNIFER: Ernest, I enjoyed shooting with you but basically, you’re a pig like so many of the men I’ve known. And now you’re just an old pig. Adios. [Jennifer drains her glass again and leaves. Hemingway looks down into his whiskey.]
SOPHIA: Strange. You had that heaven, more or less, and it all ended up pretty hellish.
HEMINGWAY: I need some air, guapa. I think I’ll walk around outside.
SOPHIA: Be careful of the path on the east side. There’s a 180-foot drop, no fence.
HEMINGWAY: Está bien. See ya round, padre.
Hemingway walks out the door, a little unsteady, around the lighthouse and onto the east path outside the walls. The sun is setting; the water is rippling like the hide of a bull out on the Bay of Biscay. He sees gulls circling below him. He spreads his arms as if to fly and tips forward. He sees a blur of white and black to his right. Then he roars in pain.
The door of the bar opens. Hemingway limps in. Happy the Dog trots in behind, herding him.
HEMINGWAY: Your dog bit me in the ass!
SOPHIA: He was just pulling you back. He does that for customers who’ve had too much.
IGNATIUS: And he’s read Proverbs 24:11. Deliver those who are drawn toward death, and hold back those stumbling to the slaughter.
HEMINGWAY: Does everybody read in this country? Let me finish that whisky, darling.
IGNATIUS: Señor Ernesto, all your life you lived by your motto: grace under pressure. Why not at the end?
HEMINGWAY: [he drinks, pauses] The pressure was too much. It’s got to be a man showing that grace. I felt I was no longer a man. And maybe what meant most to me as a man, I could no longer write.
IGNATIUS: You wrote like a good soldier: you rose every day and took up your pen like a sword. That was your first love. But it should have been your fourth.
HEMINGWAY: What do you mean?
IGNATIUS: Your first should have been God, second your wife, and third your children. You were an indifferent father and a very bad husband. Had you shown that grace under pressure, think of what you might have done for your children. And grandchildren!
HEMINGWAY: [staring at Ignatius, he spills one large tear into his whiskey] You are right, padre. In the end, I could not take the horns.
IGNATIUS: If God causes you to suffer much, it is a sign that He has great designs for you, and that He certainly intends to make you a saint.
HEMINGWAY: A saint? That’s a good one.
IGNATIUS: Saints are not perfect. They are simply sinners who’ve signed up to be soldiers in the great war, and take orders, one battle a time. Ernesto, you have been given a second chance now, by the good dog of this house, to step back from destruction. Would you consider walking with me to Santiago?
HEMINGWAY: [looks down at his drink, then finishes it and turns squarely to Ignatius] I will walk with you, Padre Ignacio. Not because you are a priest, mind you. But because you are soldier. And a Basque.
Sophia and Ignatius smile. Hemingway throws his arm around Ignatius’s shoulders, and they walk out. Sophia looks at the bar. Once again, she sees the same kind of silver coin – lion on one side, lamb on the other.
SOPHIA: Happy, must you bite so hard?
Happy: I don’t like how he looked at you.
She tousles his ears. Happy looks embarrassed.
----
Wit of the day:
Love is blind. Marriage is the eye-opener.
On a finger of land on the north coast of Spain stands a lighthouse. In the lighthouse there is an inn, the Inn at the End of the World. The inn is made of stone and old oak timbers. In the inn there is a bar. Sophia tends the bar. She never knows who is going to walk in. But the bar is well-stocked, and she knows her trade.