The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway [223]
Gossip was the best thing he did and he always knew something new and highly discreditable about anyone you could mention in Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, and other political centers.
Just then the singing really started in again, and you cannot gossip very well shouting, so it looked like a dull afternoon at Chicote’s and I decided to leave as soon as I should have bought a round myself.
Just then it started. A civilian in a brown suit, a white shirt, black tie, his hair brushed straight back from a rather high forehead, who had been clowning around from table to table, squirted one of the waiters with a flit gun. Everybody laughed except the waiter who was carrying a tray full of drinks at the time. He was indignant.
“No hay derecho,” the waiter said. This means, “You have no right to do that,” and is the simplest and the strongest protest in Spain.
The flit gun man, delighted with his success, and not seeming to give any importance to the fact that it was well into the second year of the war, that he was in a city under siege where everyone was under a strain, and that he was one of only four men in civilian clothes in the place, now squirted another waiter.
I looked around for a place to duck to. This waiter, also, was indignant and the flit gun man squirted him twice more, lightheartedly. Some people still thought it was funny, including the forceful girl. But the waiter stood, shaking his head. His lips were trembling. He was an old man and he had worked in Chicote’s for ten years that I knew of.
“No hay derecho, ” he said with dignity.
People had laughed, however, and the flit gun man, not noticing how the singing had fallen off, squirted his flit gun at the back of a waiter’s neck. The waiter turned, holding his tray.
“No hay derecho,” he said. This time it was no protest. It was an indictment and I saw three men in uniform start from a table for the flit gun man and the next thing all four of them were going out the revolving door in a rush and you heard a smack when someone hit the flit gun man on the mouth. Somebody else picked up the flit gun and threw it out the door after him.
The three men came back in looking serious, tough and very righteous. Then the door revolved and in came the flit gun man. His hair was down in his eyes, there was blood on his face, his necktie was pulled to one side and his shirt was torn open. He had the flit gun again and as he pushed, wild-eyed and white-faced, into the room he made one general, unaimed, challenging squirt with it, holding it toward the whole company.
I saw one of the three men start for him and I saw this man’s face. There were more men with him now and they forced the flit gun man back between two tables on the left of the room as you go in, the flit gun man struggling wildly now, and when the shot went off I grabbed the forceful girl by the arm and dove for the kitchen door.
The kitchen door was shut and when I put my shoulder against it it did not give.
“Get down here behind the angle of the bar,” I said. She knelt there.
“Flat,” I said and pushed her down. She was furious.
Every man in the room except the German, who lay behind a table, and the public-school-looking boy who stood in a corner drawn up against the wall, had a gun up. On a bench along the wall three over-blonde girls, their hair dark at the roots, were standing on tiptoe to see and screaming steadily.
“I’m not afraid,” the forceful one said. “This is ridiculous.”
“You don’t want to get shot in a café brawl,” I said. “If that flit king has any friends here this can be very bad.”
But he had no friends, evidently, because people began putting their pistols away and somebody lifted down the blonde screamers and everyone who had started over there when the shot came drew back away from the flit man who lay, quietly, on his back on the floor.
“No one is to leave until the police come,” someone shouted