It’s a matter of nuts or it’s a matter of new. John Dos Passos met José Robles in the early 20th century on a train to Toledo. The American writer was wandering as a knight-errant accumulating paragraphs for a book that would be titled Rocinante Rides Again and the young Spaniard offered himself as a guide with the intention of practicing his English, a language he would master to the extent that — a few years later — he translated Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos’s first great novel, and his polyglot skills would earn him a position as a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, with Dos Passos’s help.
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(A brief parenthesis to mark one of several waters of chance: when rereading Dos Passos’s Rocinante… a few days ago, I discover — as if I had never read it — that from the first line Telemachus appears so lost in the search for his father Odysseus that Dos Passos narrates him sitting in the Plaza de Santa Ana in early 20th century Madrid… read now, a century later, when the planet seems to know Homer’s Odyssey by heart, once again.)
Robles and Dos Passos established a true friendship, a condition that would be confirmed not only over the years but also even more in the true definition of friendship when compared to those who confuse the meaning and feeling or conjugation of that word. This is because after inaugurating affection translated with young Robles in Toledo, Dos Passos became an ambulance driver in the Italian battles of the First World War. There in the trenches, he met Ernest Hemingway and both became witnesses to blood and madness, banal evil, and the desire to turn it all into prose. One of the two would produce Three Soldiers and the other, A Farewell to Arms, while they established a friendship that seemed genuine and timeless… but sometimes chance boils bitterly and while Hemingway was somewhat dizzy from his meteoric success and Dos Passos was always struggling, borrowing money and getting entangled with militant leftist politics (whether advocating for Sacco and Vanzetti or denouncing all usury abuses), while Hem was playing Casanova and more interested in editorial or advertising scheming, as well as trout fishing and elephant hunting… both got caught up in playing a narrative fire that often causes serious imbalance: trying to justify as fiction the truthful and verifiable that is narrated almost faithfully (names and surnames altered). Both aired intimacies without much veil; first, Hem did (in what was translated as Fiesta!) and then Dos in several chapters of later novels, and the friendship that seemed immaculate began to stain with entanglements and envies, stumbles that healed only to repeat and more chance susceptible to souring.
Under the pretext of filming a documentary that would show the raw and painful wound with which the gunpowder and dust of the Spanish Civil War began, John Dos Passos as screenwriter and producer crossed the Pyrenees on foot to meet Hemingway in Madrid, not without first stopping in Valencia where the remnants of the government of the Second Spanish Republic already resided or retreated and where he would try to see José Robles, his friend and translator, a professor at an American university whom the nefarious Franco uprising caught with his family in Valencia. Robles’s wife received him with the anguish that her husband had disappeared, taken at dawn by men dressed in civilian clothes, with no known whereabouts but with the rumor that someone confided to her teenage son: José Robles had apparently already been executed by mistake.
Upon arriving in Madrid and meeting Hemingway, he reproached him for risking himself to fulfill the documentary without bringing provisions (instead of Valencia oranges, he expected sardines and good wine) and spat out the nonsense of looking for a friend when Hemingway’s pamplonísima definition of the conflict almost proclaimed it as a Fiesta: vodka brought by the Russians, the Bar Chicote open as if nothing, women in golden heels, escapes to the University City to shoot fascists as if it were a safari near Kilimanjaro and at night, the elegant hotel suites (where he also stayed but did not necessarily sleep with Martha Gelhorn, having left his wife with children in Florida).
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For the aforementioned documentary, Dos Passos insisted on wanting to show the daily life of the Spanish peasantry and proletariat suffering under the fascist uprising and its ravages, while Hemingway wanted to focus scripts and the cinematic lens on the daily bombings over Madrid. Two divergent definitions between two veterans of the Great War, united by chance and no longer so much by friendship. Even less by another chance: with precise date and time it is recorded that at the Hotel Florida so far from the Florida family, Hem not yet called Papa and with only a mustache (the predecessor of the white Nobel beard twenty years later) not only insists and confirms more than once that it seems nonsense to him that Dos Passos is desperate to find José Robles, but also hides informing that he not only knows, but it is certain to him that the Spanish translator had already been subjected to a summary trial, clandestine firing squad, vanished corpse… although Ernest hints to John that Robles might have been a traitor, that no one can be sure he did not take advantage of his mastery of English, French, and Russian to pass information from the heroic Republican defense to Franco’s so-called Nationals and added a dry, convenient little spiel that provoked in John Dos Passos the dignified and emphatic painful resolution to cut at that moment what seemed like a twenty-year friendship.
In the two decades following the break, there were convoluted skirmishes of reunion and almost palpable nostalgia for the first twenty years and they lived another twenty years of glimpses of embraces and so-called serenities of forgetting: Dos Passos married Hemingway’s first girlfriend and he, after Gelhorn (who was already the third) would have other marriages and nothing less nor more than the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. With intact honor and extreme elegance, it is recorded that Dos Passos traveled to Havana and Florida U.S.A. to congratulate his friend in person, but the pure essence of the word friendship had already been sullied at that intact moment in Plaza del Callao, the heart center of Madrid, where there once was a hotel called Florida.
Now that it has returned with the rains in Mexico and the fires on the edge of Paris or Madrid, now that the propensity for censorship has returned, the uncontrollable proliferation of lies, the confusion of commiseration, the unforgivable condolences at the wake of a rapist, the normalization of biting anger, the pedophilia of the powerful and the imposed lightness over the precise definition of words that are soul, it goes again: I return to the inquiry of a moment as if I could learn again that there are valuable values and brave virtue amid the mud, that there is a way to break with the unforgivable to support integrity and ask for an ice cream on the edge of so many hypocritical flames, in which case: it’s a matter of nuts.
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