The title is taken from a play, The Jew of Malta, by the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe, who is best known for savagery and nihilism (and for having been murdered when he was 30). A Jew, Barabbas, is being tried before a panel of Christian clerics when he anticipates a question:
FRIAR BARNARDINE
Thou hast committed—
BARABBAS
Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.
The story will end with a somewhat less cynical expression about a deceased woman, but we might start by observing that the phrase "in another country" is (trivially) apt in the sense that the narrator, an American, is in Milan, Italy, recuperating from a war wound, and (nontrivially) apt in a sense relating to a more figurative geography. To attend their therapeutic sessions, the narrator and the other convalescing soldiers must cross a bridge spanning a canal, on the other side of which the hospital rises. The older part of the hospital is architecturally "very beautiful" but the soldiers get their therapy in "new brick pavilions" that, we know without being told, have been thrown up to meet the need arising from the carnage of war. The narration lays a peculiar stress on the bridge crossing to get to the hospital. It's in a different district, across a boundary, "in another country" to which the casualties travel.
The therapy is a new technology that receives its first mention in the sentence about the hospital campus:
Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.
Polite and interested while understanding that the official good cheer and optimism is wishful thinking, or a lie: that's the implication. In case the reader misses the resigned bitterness, the narrator provides the following account of his experience with the machine that was to "make so much difference":
My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the ankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it move as in riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said: "That will all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like a champion."
No, it won't pass. The narrator isn't fortunate. Playing football was for the world that existed before the brick pavilions and these useless therapies. That's what the narrator understands but, maintaining a certain sense of decorum, does not state outright. The "geography" of the story refers to a region of the mind or spirit. The narrator's experience of life, especially of war, has exiled him from the land of respectable, uplifting views.
This theme is variously developed, considering that the story is very brief—less than 4 pages in this online pdf. The machines are one lie. Another is the medals that the soldiers have been awarded. The narrator has medals since he'd been wounded, the wound being in his view a mere accident: he might have escaped injury, or he could have been killed, but it happened that he was wounded, so he has medals and commendations stating, "with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American." That is his experience; here is someone else's:
Another boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South America and worked in a bank.
Another accident, a disfiguring wound, a bitter joke, the way in which the flatness of the details that are divulged tend to undercut notions of honor, valor, glory: "He went to South America and worked in a bank."
The story ends with an episode relating to another of the patients, an Italian major with a withered hand. Being older and from Milan, he is apart from the other soldiers, but the narrator speaks with him when he comes regularly for his treatments. Though an Italian, the major resides in the same figurative country as the other soldiers—the first mention of him, before he steps forward at the end, is his half humorous, half mocking contribution to the narrator's conversation with the optimistic doctor: "And will I too play football, captain-doctor?" He knows the machines won't change anything, but, like the others, goes along with the prescribed regimen, and he and the narrator speak Italian together, the major giving lessons in grammar after the narrator says that Italian seems the easiest of languages. The story till now has been all decorum on the surface, cynicism and despair just below. Then one day the decorous major blows up. He pronounces the machines "idiotic." He calls the narrator an "impossible disgrace" for his grammatical mistakes. He somewhat oddly asks the narrator whether he plans to marry, insisting, "Speak grammatically!" When the narrator says he hopes to marry, the major explodes with anger. He jerks his hand out of a machine, tells the attendant to "turn this damned thing off." He is ushered away briefly and, returning, apologizes to the narrator for his outburst, explaining that his wife has just died. Then:
He stood there biting his lower lip. "It is very difficult," he said. "I cannot resign myself."
He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. "I am utterly unable to resign myself," he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door.
"I cannot resign myself. . . . I am utterly unable to resign myself." I have mentioned before this "trick" Hemingway has of achieving an elevated effect by pretending to translate speech in one language into English that he can then make sound like the King James Bible (since it's a translation, possibly wooden or literal, rather than the actual words spoken). Maybe he was too fond of the trick but I think it worked this time. Part of the success must be that all the soldiers seem "resigned," and the major, facing a catastrophe unrelated to war—the scope in this very short story is widening—suggests that he regards "resignation" as an ideal that he has in this instance failed to attain. But he recovers himself to make a "soldierly" exit.
There is one more paragraph describing how the major stayed away for three days before returning for more useless treatments. In those three days the doctor has filled the walls with framed photographs of functioning limbs supposedly healed by the new machines. The story ends:
In front of the machine the major used were three photographs of hands like his that were completely restored. I do not know where the doctor got them. I always understood we were the first to use the machines. The photographs did not make much difference to the major because he only looked out of the window.
Some of Hemingway's stories are unscreamed screams. In this one, the scream comes out and is then stuffed.
Comments