by Simon Richelieu

Created on: December 09, 2008   Last Updated: January 11, 2009

"He's supposed to have faced down a grizzly bear by walking up and talking to it."

The girl under the cafe umbrella looked startled. She put the book on the table, the front cover showing a picture of a matador, and the title in bold capitals Death in the Afternoon.

"Who do you mean?"

"Ernest Hemingway. Either he was as drunk as a skunk or he made up the story."

She laughed and replied: "Probably both."

The cafe overlooked the village square of Benalmadena. This was not the coastal resort of that name, this was the pueblo up in the hills. Fifty metres from the Cafe Antonio a fountain sprayed cool water into a circular pool in the centre of which stood a statue, a young woman, nude, holding a bowl in front of her.

Peterson looked around the half empty cafe and said, quite unapologetically:

"May I join you?"

She did not reply to the question directly but said as he sat down,

"You seem to know about Hemingway."

"He was my idol when I was at Oxford reading English."

Her face registered interest, eyes and mouth smiling, framed by a bouquet of ash-blonde hair that fell to her bare sun-tanned shoulders.

"Which college?"

"I was at Univ, and I was more interested in reading him and drinking Cuba Libres than studying The Dream of the Rood and supping ale. Are you a student?"

"I'm at Balliol reading Modern Languages. Hence my trip to Spain."

At this moment Antonio arrived at the table to take the order. The girl smiled at Peterson: "Let me guess. A Cuba Libre?"

He returned the smile, nodding, and before he could say anything to Antonio she had rattled off fluently: "Un Cuba Libre y un vino blanco muy frio, por favor."

"Si senora, muy frio."

"Gracias"

Peterson had noticed, with a frisson of disappointment, the senora - not senorita.

He indicated the upturned book.

"So how does Hemingway strike you? Are you as dazzled by him as I was when I was twenty?"

"He's a bit of a poser. See what he says about taking your mistress to Valencia." She grinned, adding: "Perhaps it should have been called Bullshit in the Afternoon."

Peterson laughed at her cleverness and countered:

"You may have a point. But I still believe that he was one of the great twentieth-century writers. After all, only a handful has coined a phrase which has passed directly into the English language."

She looked at him a question mark in her dazzling blue eyes.

"When the hero made love to Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls he wrote that the earth moved."

"Now I have learned something. My trip to Spain has not been wasted!"

The ice was broken;

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