Couldn’t find this one online anywhere, but it’s okay, because it’s fairly short and I’m just going to talk about it in a general way.

Sometimes writers use short stories to merely talk about general types, instead of exploring something more specific or individualistic; as far as I can tell they do this because these stories are quicker and easier to write than the latter, and, when you’re a big name like Ernest Hemingway, you can get paid a handsome sum of money by Esquire no matter what you do, so why not belt a couple out every once in a while? I recall F. Scott Fitzgerald doing much the same thing in a lot of his short stories, his subject being that which he seemed to be obsessed with — the American moneyed classes; Hemingway’s obsessions were, of course, a lot more ‘earthy,’ and so here we have a story about the general types of Madrid as he saw them in the 1930s.

Here’s an interesting Hemingway anecdote (which you should already know if you read his biography at Wikipedia like you were supposed to, but it applies here so I’m going to mention it again): one day Hemingway bet some colleagues $10 that he could write a complete short story in only six words:

For Sale: Baby shoes, Never Worn.

I don’t know what he did with his new $10.

The first sentence of The Capital of the World functions in much the same way:

Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is the diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: Paco meet me at the Hotel Montana noon Tuesday all is forgiven Papa and how a squadron of Guardia Civil had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement.

At the risk of generalizing: from the belief that 800 men, at least, would answer such an advertisement, to the fact it is told as a joke, tells you so many things about the attitude of the people of Madrid; but that’s what this story is about — a quick examination of and slightly satirical treatment of the general types you’d encounter lolling about the cafés at the time.

We’ve got an older, hard-working waiter who supports his younger, Anarcho-Syndicalist colleague in principle, even though he can’t be bothered with the ideology himself; we’ve got three distinct variations of the ’second-rate matador,’ along with a couple of picadors and banderilleros as well; we’ve got two priests who are both respected and despised by the other characters, and, finally, we’ve got a couple of young women — Paco’s sisters — who enjoy going to the movies and dream about love and glamour. You really get the impression that this was simply the rag-tag group congregated in a hotel dining-room one night while Papa was into the wine, and he created a little flashcard for each one then threw them into this story.

The main character, however, is a little different; if you haven’t guessed already, his name is Paco, though he is not of the same Pacos so humorously skewered in the opening sentence. No, for this Paco:

. . . who waited on table at the Pension Luarca, had no father to forgive him, nor anything for the father to forgive . . . he came from a village in a part of Extramadura where conditions were incredibly primitive, food scarce, and comforts unknown and he had worked hard ever since he could remember . . . he loved Madrid, which was still an unbelievable place, and he loved his work which, done under bright lights, with clean linen, the wearing of evening clothes, and abundant food in the kitchen, seemed romantically beautiful.

So, basically, a wide-eyed kid in the big city, looking or romance or adventure. And where does he hope to find that adventure? In the bull-ring, of course. The basic plot of the story is that he dreams of being a bullfighter, and tells his dreams to the dishwasher of the hotel, Enrique, who is an older man and a bit of a world-weary cynic. Enrique tells Paco that his dreams are very common, that “if it wasn’t for fear every bootblack in Spain would be a bullfighter.” Paco then insists he has no fear, which maybe he doesn’t, or maybe he’s just not smart to realize he should be afraid. To prove Paco’s will, Enrique ties knives to two legs of a chair and imitates a bull so Paco can practice his moves (though Enrique does express second thoughts before they start). Predictably, after a few clean passes, Paco moves too slowly, is gutted by one of the knives and dies. And then the story ends with this:

As the doctor from the first-aid station came up the stairs accompanied by a policeman who held on to Enrique by the arm, the two sisters of Paco were still in the moving picture palace of the Gran Via, where they were intensely disappointed in the Garbo film, which showed the great star in miserable low surroundings when they had been accustomed to see her surrounded by great luxury and brilliance . . . all the other people from the hotel were doing almost what they had been doing when the accident happened, except that the two priests had finished their devotions and were preparing for sleep, and the gray-haired picador had moved his drink over to the table with the two houseworn prostitutes. A little later he went out of the café with one of them. It was the one for the whom the matador who had lost his nerve had been buying drinks.

The boy Paco had never known about any of this nor about what all these people would be doing on the next day and on other days to come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. He did not even realize they ended. He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition. He had not even had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.

One boy dies, the Capital of (his) World goes on as if he had never existed. As is usually the way, is it not?

Etching by: Luis Quintanilla