Hemingway Adventure (1999) (18 page)

Valencia’s
Fallas
Festival. Papier mache model of Spielberg looms over the Titanic and assorted Oscars.

Fallas processions.

Bullfighter Vicente Barrera is a trained lawyer and as clean-cut as a choirboy. Difficult to square his appearance with the fact that he kills over two hundred bulls a year.

Every day at two o’clock a crowd engulfs Valencia’s main square to be blasted by the mighty explosive event they call
Mascleta
.

At the
corrida
(the bullfight) in Valencia. Vicente Barrera, bedecked in
traje de luces
, his suit of lights, completes a pass.

All that’s left of a year’s painstaking design and construction.

King of the Fallas - a fifty-foot-high model of Gulliver is the last of the city’s effigies to be torched.

Surreal moment. Gulliver has gone, but some of his companions have missed the flames.

Marlin, the best game fish in the world, drew Hemingway to Key West.

Period postcard of the railroad which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1935.