The Dangerous Summer

The circle was deliberate: Ordóñez was the son of Cayetano Ordóñez — 'Niño de la Palma,' the model for The Sun Also Rises' Pedro Romero — and Hemingway attached himself to the son's summer with the devotion he'd given the father's, following the cuadrilla from feria to feria, keeping the wounds chart, riding in the cars. The rivalry was real and escalating: Dominguín, older, richer, coming out of retirement; Ordóñez, in Hemingway's scoring, the classicist reborn; both gored repeatedly as the mano a mano corridas pushed each man past sense. The old man in the entourage — Pamplona again, Valencia, Málaga — was watching his own twenties with the cast changed, and knew it.

The writing defeated him: the Life piece metastasized, and cutting it proved beyond his failing health — the struggle with this manuscript shadowed his last two years, and the despair of it is part of the biography of his death. Life ran a version in 1960; the book, trimmed by Scribner's editors with an introduction by James Michener, appeared in 1985. Read against Death in the Afternoon it is the elegy to that book's treatise — the same faith in the ring's tragedy, now personal: an aging master measuring younger ones, in the country he loved first, for the last time.

Spain, summer 1959. Hemingway returns after years away — Franco's Spain now, the old wounds politely unmentioned — and joins Antonio Ordóñez's traveling court as the season builds toward the mano a mano: paired corridas in which the brothers-in-law face six bulls between them, city by city, each afternoon an escalation. The book keeps the tour's rhythm — roads, hotels, night drives, the cuadrilla's economy of nerves — with the fights rendered in the old connoisseur's precision: the passes named, the bulls judged, the crowds read like weather.

The summer turns dangerous on schedule: horn wounds take each man in turn, and the rivalry's arithmetic — who returns too early, who tops whom in Málaga's terrible paired afternoon — plays out against Hemingway's open partisanship for Ordóñez and his mounting sense of watching something both magnificent and unrepeatable. It ends as seasons end, with rankings settled in blood and the aficionado driving away from Spain — this time, though the book doesn't say it, for good.