This celebrated short story is less than 1,500 words long, and comprises mostly dialogue between an unnamed American man and woman in Spain. William Faulkner’s comment on Hemingway – that “he has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary” – is certainly in evidence here, with descriptions such as “The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.”
Yet Hemingway’s rebuttal to Faulkner – “does he really think big emotions come from big words?” – is also proven correct, as with a few sparse words Hemingway evokes the oppressive heat that exacerbates the tension in the couple’s strained conversation. They talk in non-sequiturs, and take offence at each other’s superficially inoffensive statement, such as when the woman says, “Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe” and the man snaps back, “Oh, cut it out.”
Hemingway never states outright what it is that they’re talking about, and there is no commentary on the characters’ interior feelings; the whole story is narrated as if observed by someone sitting silently at a nearby table, with the reader left to work out how the characters are feeling for themselves. It is that makes the story so masterful, capturing perfectly how people speak when they are attempting not to have an argument or discuss serious matters in public, but are failing to keep their emotions in check all the same.
