Che ti dice la patria?

Hard times in “Il Bel Paese.” This morning I read an article in the Corriere della Sera, which said that the Italian government has now declared a national “State of Emergency” because of illegal immigration. The official communiqué from the Council of Ministers explains the decision as an attempt to deal with the “persistent and exceptional inflow of non-EU citizens”, most of whom have been washing up on the shores of southern Italian beaches, some alive but many of them dead.

Illegal immigrants in a boat off the Italian coast

Of course, without knowing anything about Italy or its present government a reader might think, “well, yes, that is a problem.” Every country has a right to its own immigration policy and rules are rules. You can’t just float up on a beach, half dead from the sun and the salt, and perhaps even after having seen your friends and family drown and expect to be welcomed by the local authorities. Bruttissima figura (very bad form) as the Italians would say.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

Order will be maintained and Silvio Berlusconi, being the savvy politician that he is, knows that in economically difficult times one of the best ways to distract voters and keep them in a state of fear is to persecute those who are different or disadvantaged. It works in the USA, where we’re building a reinforced concrete wall between ourselves and Mexico, and it’ll work in Italy, too. In fact, not only has the government decided to zero in on illegal immigration, they’ve also singled out the Rom or “gypsies” for special attention. Another government law, this one from the 11th of July, decreed that there would be a national census of all the Rom, children included, living in the outskirts of major Italian cities. This decree, according to the Berlusconi government would finally deal with the “gypsy question”, enhancing the security of all of Italy’s citizens.

The fact that at least a quarter of the Rom in Italy are Italian citizens, and have been for generations, and as such have the right to go wherever they please in the country doesn’t seem to bother anyone in the government. The equation, gypsy = thief (or worse) has been not so subtly reinforced in people’s minds and that’s all that matters. A convenient scapegoat has been found, and if the cost of living in Italy is sky high and families are finding it harder and harder to save or even make it to the end of the month, well, then at least they know that there’s someone below them in the social pecking order.

Having lived and worked in Italy for over twenty years, I am sad to see this happening, but it's not totally unexpected. Berlusconi’s pogrom against i diversi (the different) is a part of a worldwide trend, a planetary disease pitting the rich against the poor.

Of course, you could say that this isn’t the first time that the Italians have led the rest of the planet boldly into the future. Back in the 1920’s they were at the forefront of another social trend, but then history never repeats itself, right?

Carnage and Mayhem

Perhaps not everyone caught the recent video clip of the President where, in an effort to explain America’s current economic doldrums, he says that “Wall Street got drunk and now it has a hangover.” As yet another example of Bush’s finesse and intellect in dealing with complex problems it’s not bad. Millions of people are being kicked out of their homes, the cost of everything from gasoline to food is skyrocketing and this guy just laughs.

WPA poster from 1930's

My grandfather used to complain about FDR back in the 1930’s, saying that Roosevelt was destroying Key West and turning it into a tourist trap with his “Work Progress Administration,” but I can’t even imagine what he’d have to say about Bush. FDR may have hastened the island’s demise, in Ernest’s eyes, as a good place to live, but most historians view Roosevelt as a man who strengthened America, not weakened it.

Yet, were my grandfather alive today, who would he vote for? Side with John McCain (who is apparently quite a fan of Ernest) and you get “another 100 years” of war in Iraq, and Ernest, in spite of his experiences on the Italian front in WWI and his work as a correspondent in Spain during the Civil War and later on in France, was not a fan of genocide. He hated it, as anyone who’s ever read his dispatches from Anatolia for the Toronto Star can attest.

Senator Obama, however, is hardly what you could call a “peace” candidate. It’s true that he wants to pull out most combat troops from Iraq, but only to “better” use them fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. But no western power has ever managed to completely subdue the tribes in Afghanistan. The British Empire couldn’t do it, nor could the Soviets, who were literally kicked out of the country, and I doubt that Obama will be able to do it either. Once elected (and I don’t think that there’s any doubt that he will be the next US president) he’ll continue to spend billions of dollars (that in truth America doesn’t have) on a war that can’t be won. Thousands of soldiers on both sides will die, along with an even greater number of civilians and for what? What will we have accomplished in the end? Carnage and mayhem or untold suffering, what kind of choice is that?

The passage of time

A good friend of mine from Milano, Vittorio Pisapia, read my last posting and told me that when he went to Pamplona in 2006 for the Fiesta he had two images of my grandfather in mind. The first was the one I used in “The Undefeated”, of Ernest as an old man in 1953 watching a bullfight with his wife Mary, while the second photo (below) is of a much younger and more vigorous man taken in 1927.


I told him that the fact that he had these two photographs of Ernest in mind reminded me of what I’d written in another posting “El Doble”, mirror images of the same man, distorted by time.

But Vittorio disagreed. “In my opinion it’s not quite the same thing, or better yet, there is a connection, it’s true. But while in “El Doble” you talk about the death of Pablo and of Ernest who probably was there while all of this was happening and who sees Pablo, the two photographs of Ernest speak of two different moments and of two different people, even if the person and the place are exactly the same. In between these two photos there’s an entire lifetime.”

The Undefeated

Ernest Hemingway was a complicated man and so whenever someone asks me what I think of his enduring macho image or what he himself might have thought about the world today and its problems, I usually say that there were many different “Papas.” He was certainly a man’s man, un vero hombre, who liked to fish and to hunt and to womanize, but he was also the author of the gender bending posthumous novel “The Garden of Eden” and many other works where he examined his lifelong fascination with androgyny.

Likewise, it’s hard to pin him down politically. When a journalist in Pamplona asked me what I thought my grandfather would think about Guantanamo and its torture scandal, I said that these were crimes against humanity and that, obviously, Ernest, were he still alive, would speak out against them. My grandfather, I reminded the journalist, supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He was a democrat in the sense that he believed in democracy and the right of the Spanish people to have a Republic, if that was what they wanted.

Of course, his support wasn’t limited to his bylines or his novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” In addition to raising money in the United States to buy ambulances for the Republican Army, he also did the narration for the Republican propaganda film “The Spanish Earth.” Without a doubt, what he experienced in Madrid during the war affected him deeply, and when the Fascists won he said that he would never return so long as they were in power.

It was a promise he kept until 1953 when he returned to Spain with his wife Mary. By that time, even though he was only 54, he was ageing fast and he wanted to see the corridas again before he died and to be a part of that world of toreros, bulls and muletas.


His return was widely criticized by many on the Left, who said that it was a betrayal of his ideals and everything that he had written about during the Civil War. Certainly, having the author of “The Sun Also Rises” back in Spain must have been a PR coup for the Franco regime. It was the kind of publicity that money could never buy, but Ernest had already fought his battle, and had lost, and there was nothing he could do about the political situation. Franco ruled the country with an iron fist and would outlive my grandfather by fourteen years.

The irony of all this is that while he was in Spain as a special guest of the regime his own government continued to spy on him. He had long been considered a leftist and a potential subversive by the FBI and its chief, J. Edgar Hoover (in part because of his support of the Spanish Republican cause), and the file that they kept on him grew and grew over the years until it numbered over 19,000 pages.

Yet, in spite of what anyone may say about him and his decision to return to Spain, perhaps Ernest wasn’t so wrong in having an ambivalent attitude towards politics. Looking over the political landscape of the USA today and the absolute disregard that both Republican and Democratic politicians have for the will of the people, I’d say that not much has changed since the 1950’s. We may have voted in 2006 to end the war in Iraq, but the political elite continues to do what it wants, to wage its wars and spy on us regardless of what we think. None of them can be trusted and perhaps the only thing that matters in the end is living your life as best you can. As my grandfather did, ignoring the bastards in power.

Encierro and Spanish TV interview

Here's a video of the first encierro, the 7th of July, and a short interview that I did afterwards with a journalist from Canal Cuatro.

El Doble

Yesterday was the 84th anniversary of the first recorded death in an encierro during the Fiesta de San Fermin. Esteban Domeño was mortally wounded by a bull in Calle Estafeta and I know about this not because I’m any sort of historian of these tragic events but because of a chance encounter I had.

I was walking down Calle Estafeta towards the curve and had stopped to look at something in one of the stores when my friend, Josep Molina, tapped me on the shoulder and said that there were two filmmakers up ahead that I should meet. It was eleven o’clock and I had already done three interviews that morning but Josep promised me that this had nothing to do with the press or photo ops. They had an interesting idea, he said.

Sergio Oksman and Carlos Muguiro, in fact, were shooting a film about my grandfather and had been inspired by a photograph taken just moments before Domeño’s death in Calle Estafeta. In the photo another young man, Pablo Guerendiain, has been wounded by the bulls and is lying in a fetal position just in front of the store that his father owned. At the same time all this was happening, and just out of the picture, my grandfather was probably watching the bulls and the runners from the balcony of his room in the Hotel La Perla. It was where he stayed when he came to Pamplona and while no one can prove that he was actually there that morning, Ernest had a talent for always finding the best place to be, whatever the occasion, and you really couldn’t find a better observation post than a balcony on the second floor of the Hotel La Perla.

The film then explores the idea of the “double” or what normally lies beyond our field of vision and how often in life what we can’t see, the hidden part of our existence, is as interesting and important as what we do see. In this case we have two young men who compliment each other, Pablo Guerendiain, immobilized and looking at nothing as he prays that any remaining bulls will ignore him, and Ernest Hemingway looking at Pablo and taking in the rush of events that would leave another young man dead on the cobblestones.

Sergio and Carlos sent me a treatment of their story and as I read it and looked at the photograph that had inspired them I thought that it had a lot to do with Ernest’s theory of writing, i.e. that ninety percent of any tale lies just below of what you can see. It is the hidden element of our day to day existence, the unconscious undertow of emotions and events that pulls us along. It is something that we rarely see and when we do we are shocked to have it there in front of us, this shadow of ourselves, a true reflection of who we are.

My memoir, Strange Tribe, from this point of view is another examination of ones “doubles”. I needed to understand my father Gregory and what had gone on between him and my grandfather before I was born (outside of my field of vision), to see how their battle had impacted on my own life. I needed to see clearly the tragic story of two men who were so similar and who loved each other so much that they reached a point where communication was impossible. A family history that perhaps isn’t so different from many others, universal in its own way.

Interview with Basque television

Another interview from Eitb24, the Basque television network in Pamplona, describing my visit to the city. In it I watch the Procesión de San Fermin from a balcony, and then pay a visit to the Casino above the Cafe Iruña where the artist/impresario Mikel Urmeneta welcomed me to Pamplona and offered me one of his new creations, a drink made with frozen wine, Coca Cola and carbonated candy poppers! The drink is called Kulumuchu and is served in a chilled lemon peel. Afterwards we paid our respects to my bronze abuelo in the bar El Rincón de Hemingway. It's a great likeness of Ernest (and a great bar, for that matter) and well worth investigating.

Photo by Jonathan Knowles