A man from Pamplona on Ernest Hemingway

It’s a man. It is actually the head of a man, a strong man. Somebody told me he was a writer and I thought “like me”.

Years later, I found his name written on the cover of an old book.

Some people from my little town say that he was bad for us, they say his description of our fiesta was wrong.

Then I read:

“In the Basque country the land all looks very rich and green and the houses and villages look well-off and clean. Every village had a pelota court and on some of them kids were playing in the hot sun.”

Or:

“You could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona.”

I can imagine Hemingway in the streets that the bulls pass along when they run early in the morning on their way to the ring.

The same streets I have walked along since I was a child.

He even said that he thought that the facade of the cathedral was ugly the first time he seen it but after he change his mind. I think this facade can only be beautiful for somebody who loved this town.

What about the fiesta?

As Hemingway said in “The Sun Also Rises":

“At noon of Sunday, the 6^th of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it.”