Ernest Hemingway: The Capital of the World
Madrid 1936/37
“Before, death came when you were old or sick, now it comes to all… who have no place to run or hide.”
Ernest Hemingway’s short story, The Capital of the World, was written in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, and is nomally about a young man, Paco, a waiter who lives in Madrid and wants to become a matador. But Hemingway’s story is about so much more, as the following snippet suggests:
Paco had said nothing. He did not yet understand politics but it always gave him a thrill to hear the tall waiter speak of the necessity for killing the priests and the Guardia Civil. The tall waiter represented to him revolution and the revolution also was romantic…
Paco would soon lose his romanticism and his life.
Soon after Hemingway and Martha were re-united in Spain he took her up into the red hills of the Guadalajara sector where they both watched scores of fascist soldiers move like ants up the steep bluffs across the valley to take up new positions against further Republican attacks. In fact the Republican forces were having quite a few successes in the field and discounted as unimportant that…
