Today I sent out one of my favorite stories. Paco. I have read this story perhaps a hundred times and with every reading, after the very last word, I sigh. Sometimes I cry.
It’s a short story that I have made longer. (I could have written “that I have lengthened” but that doesn’t sound right to my ears this morning.) Stories are flexible and adaptable. Storytellers are always changing them around, adding or deleting a word here and there, an image, or an emphasis, and the stories don’t seem to mind at all. “Just tell me,” I imagine them saying. “I need air to breathe, space to roam, hearts to inhabit.”
The story this morning was first told in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Capital of the World.” Here it is as Hemingway wrote it. You may like this short version better. He called it a joke but I think that was his way of saying “think about it.”
Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is the diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY ALL IS FORGIVEN PAPA and how a squadron of Guardia Civil had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement.