As time passes, Alberto tends to embellish the qualities of his adversary - ‘Ducks are very intelligent, they see and hear well’ - at the expense of his own species: ‘Who is that by the camera wearing a red jacket? … Who is that idiot standing up?’ But most wounding of all is that the chicken millionaire in a nearby barrel has bagged four already.
‘His ducks are calling well,’ admits Alberto.
Certainly our vivi, having got over their initial indignation at being thrown in the water, seem to be quite happy, dipping for fish and not attracting anyone.
So we wait and call and wait and watch. Alberto turns out to be a good companion, and his wide and sympathetic knowledge of country matters bears out the point that no one knows or cares more about the habits of animals than those who kill them. I learn, for instance, that if the female of a pair of ducks is shot, the male will always come back to look for her, whereas a female will never come back for a male.
Alberto likes me because I’m not impatient. I don’t like to tell him that I have followed Hemingway’s example and brought a book to read, as well as a hip-flask. And opened both.
After an hour and a half there is sudden excitement. A flock is turning towards us, only fifty yards away and coming in low. To encourage them, Alberto is frantically giving his widgeon on the whistle. Then, just as they seem to be taking avoiding action, I hear a shot followed by the thwack of a bird skidding across the ice. A spent cartridge flies out of the magazine, narrowly missing my left ear. Alberto looks relieved. The duck flaps for a while and lies still.
And that’s all we get. Though we remain in the barrels for a hopeful half-hour more, it seems the curse of Palin, that so frustrated our trout-fishing in Michigan, has struck again.
Back at the casone the mood is subdued. No one in the party even shot double figures. Various theories are advanced. Weather too settled, end of the season, so ducks wiser. Alberto tries to make us feel better.
‘Hemingway was not so good, you know.’ He peels off a balaclava, smooths his hair back and goes on. ‘At the end of the shoot, all the ducks would be arranged in the yard in front of the house, so everyone could see what everyone had caught. And it was a little embarrassing sometimes, because someone would have sixty, another fifty, and Hemingway only four.’
‘Four?’
Alberto nods, and I detect a hint of barely suppressed satisfaction. ‘He was not a good shot but he was a great character.’
The newspapers this morning lead with stories of unheard-of weather conditions. Winds from Siberia, snow in Sicily.
Oddly, the worst weather is in the south. Perhaps it’s too cold to snow up here. Instead we have bright, crisp sunshine as our train pulls out through the straggling northern suburbs of Milan, heading for the lakes and the mountains.
Italy has been a revelation. I have seen where Hemingway shot and was shot at. I’ve drunk in his bars and sat in his hotel. I have walked the cities where he fell in love. I’ve seen where the legend of the warrior began and met those who saw the start of his final decline.
But that is to jump ahead.
When Hemingway first left Italy he was nineteen. A Farewell to Arms would not be written for another ten years. He was, however, already somebody special. He had been to war, he had recovered from a bomb blast that had left 227 separate wounds in his legs and he would go back to America as a war hero. ‘Worst Shot-Up Man in US Returns Home’ shouted the Chicago American as he arrived in New York. The beautiful woman who’d nursed him was in love with him and the Italians had given him a medal. And all because he had followed his own gut instinct, made his own moves, wriggled out of the loving, stifling grasp of his family.
He tried to adjust to life back home, but once the war-hero adulation had worn off and his beautiful nurse had written to tell him she’d found someone else, the old frustration set in.
The next time Hemingway left for Europe it was not six months but nine years before he came back to live in America.
Sudden blackness. Into the tunnel and under the Alps. We shall be in Paris in another four hours.
PARIS
‘Then there was the bad weather.’
This is how Hemingway begins A Moveable Feast - his fond tribute to one of the world’s most beautiful cities. And it gets worse. In the sort of paragraph which puts travel agents out of business, he waxes lyrical over ‘the smell of dirty bodies’, ‘a sad, evilly run cafe where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together’, and leaves lying ‘sodden in the rain’
.
From such uncompromising beginnings Hemingway fashions one of the most tasty, tantalising and original glimpses of the city of Paris, without once having to resort to the word ‘romantic’
.
The irony is that a book which celebrates the promise of a young man with a life ahead of him was completed in the year Hemingway killed himself and published after his death
.
A Moveable Feast is a bittersweet legacy, but amongst the bitterness (directed almost entirely at those who were once his friends) is a fine evocation of what it was like to be young and starting out on an awfully big adventure. How much of it still rings true remains to be seen
.
As we unload our filming equipment outside a hotel in the rue Delambre on this fading February afternoon there is one thing he was absolutely right about. The weather is lousy
.
Our hotel is in the heart of Montparnasse where Hemingway sites are as frequent as the trees on the street. Almost anywhere Ernest blew his nose qualifies for a mention in one or other of the guidebooks.
I decide this first morning to take an early orientation course, a Hemingway trail of my own. Trying to plan it on a map is like one of those children’s puzzles where you have to join up the dots to make a donkey so I give that up and simply turn right out of the hotel and head for the nearest breakfast.
This being Paris, the first place of refreshment is about twenty yards away.
Disconcertingly though, it’s Italian. Even more disconcertingly it’s called the Auberge de Venise, and its walls are decorated with gondolas and palazzos and views of the Grand Canal. I half expect to see Barone Franchetti lighting up on one of the balconies.
In fact this espresso-fragrant establishment ties together Hemingway’s Venice and Hemingway’s Paris rather neatly, for this was once the Dingo Bar, and it was here that Ernest first met Scott Fitzgerald.
He had come into the Dingo Bar in the Rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters, had introduced himself and introduced a tall pleasant man who was with him as Dunc Chaplin, the famous pitcher. I had not followed Princeton baseball and had never heard of Dunc Chaplin but he was extraordinarily nice, unworried, relaxed and friendly and I much preferred him to Scott.
A Moveable Feast
I dip my biscuit into the cappuccino and shut my eyes and try to engineer some psychic link-up between myself and two of the most celebrated American authors of the century - and Dunc, of course - but all I get is the bronchial roar of the coffee machine and a request to move up as the place is getting busy and I’ve been here twenty minutes.
Other ghosts linger in the Auberge de Venise a.k.a. the Dingo Bar. Hemingway used to drink here with an English aristocrat called Lady Duff Twysden (born Dorothy Smurth-waite) and her lover Pat Guthrie. They became his models for Brett Ashley, one of the best, least sentimental of Hemingway’s female creations, and Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises. Maybe these were the worthless characters he was referring to.