Hemingway’s Lost Masterpiece “All the Art in the World”
or The Old Man and the Sea of Paintings: A Still Life
It was a starry night. I was sitting at a table with a girl with a pearl earring. You could only see the one earring from the side and could not be sure if there even was another one. If you are a simple man it is a very hard thing to understand things you can not see.
She had one of those smiles that confused you when you looked at it and then when you looked closer, it confused you even more. She called herself Mona Lisa but I thought of her as La Gioconda. It does not translate well.
We were at a cafe in Guernica. It was very quiet except for the sound of the bombs in the distance. A cafe terrace at night can be the most quiet place in the world. There was only us. Us and a few of the regular nighthawks. Each of them was lonely in their own way. It was tragic but fascism had a way of making everyone lonely and there was not a damned thing you could do about it. We were all lonely together.
I looked around for the waiter. It was hard to find him at this hour. You could never be sure who had the nightwatch. That’s how it was then. Everything was dark and somber. I nodded at him but he just sat there with his chin resting on his hand, as immovable as a still life with fruit. He was quite the thinker, that one.
We wanted some food but all they had lining the shelves were some old battered Campbell’s Soup Cans. Everything was rationed then.
I was sad when I realized that we could not eat. There was the soup but there was no art in that. Warhol had once been the middle-weight soup can painting champion at Princeton but do think that title meant a lot to me.
That was when I realized that we had already had the last supper we would ever have together. That’s how it is with some things, you don’t know that the last one has already happened.
“David,” she said.
I sat there still and exposed, naked to the world like a marble statue, like a reclining nude. It was like everyone was staring at me.
“David, do you love me?” she asked.
So she wanted to go down that path. Naked and alone, like a nude descending a staircase. She was quite modernist about those things, even then.
I looked out at the water lilies and where they floated quietly in the pond near a small bridge. I had an impression of something but I was not sure what.
I loved her maybe more than a man should ever love anything. Since the birth of venus and all the men who had loved women, hell, maybe even since the creation of Adam, no son of man had maybe loved that much. But damned if I was going to say so. Love in a time of war is a messy thing, like a Pollock.
I tried to think about better times. About when I had been young and innocent. But then after my American Gothic phase, I had gone to the School of Athens and tried to have thoughts that were larger than a man like myself was meant to have. All it did was teach you how little you knew. It was a sort of philosophy.
That’s when I heard the scream. In that scream there was all the sadness in the world. It was surreal. It was the kind of scream that if you heard it, it stayed with you forever.
The persistence of memory is a very hard thing.
Finally there was nothing else to do so I called the waiter over and asked for the soup from the cans.
“No soup for you,” he said.
There would be no soup. No matter how long you wait or what you say, sometimes there is no soup for you. There was nothing funny in that.
The art of living is hard for everyone but afterward, some art is stronger in the broken places.
As Hemingway said, courage is clapping with grace under pressure. There’s nothing to clapping, all you do is put your finger over the little green hands and bleed.
If you liked this, you might enjoy the below. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
