The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl, who was also an American, so they were both Americans, with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid, as was its custom.
“What should we drink?” the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.
“It’s pretty hot,” the man said. “Let’s drink beer.”
“Dos cervezas,” the man said into the curtain.
“Big ones?” a woman asked from the doorway.
“Yes. Two big ones.”
The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
“They look like white elephants,” she said. This was because they were white elephants, but she did not know that yet. The white elephants held themselves very still.
“Don’t move,” one of the white elephants said out of the corner of its mouth. “Be very quiet.”
“Shh,” said another.
“I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“I might have,” the man said. ‘just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.”
The girl looked at the bead curtain. “They’ve painted something on it,” she said.” What does it say?”
“Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.”
“Could we try it?”
The man called “Listen” through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.
“Four reales.”
“We want two Anis del Toro.”
“With water? ”
“Do you want it with water?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Is it good with water?”
“It’s all right.”
“You want them with water?” asked the woman.
“Yes, with water.”
“It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down.
“That’s the way with everything.”
“Not particularly,” the girl said. “Lots of things don’t taste like licorice. Flank steak, for example. And mangos. Papayas. Papayas don’t taste good, but they don’t taste like licorice.”
“Oh, cut it out.”
“You started it,” the girl said. “I was being amused. I was having a fine time.”
“Well, let’s try and have a fine time.”
“All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?” This was because they were white elephants.
“That was bright.”
“I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it–look at things and try new drinks?”
“I guess so.”
The girl looked across at the hills, which weren’t hills at all, remember, but a herd of elephants keeping perfectly still. Waiting.
“They’re lovely hills,” she said. (They weren’t really hills.) “They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.” But they were white elephants.
“Should we have another drink?”
“All right.”
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
“The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said.
“It’s lovely,” the girl said.
“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. Her name wasn’t Jig, but she’d never had the heart to correct him. Who on earth is named Jig.
“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything.
“I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”
The man at the table next to them leaned over. The man wore a broad white hat. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing you. I’m a doctor, and that’s not how abortions work at all.”
“I’m sorry?” the man said.
“We don’t just “let the air in.” That’s a ridiculous characterization of what we do. We dilate the cervix, start a course of antibiotics, insert a speculum — if it’s far enough along we inject a drug directly into the abdomen to stop the fetal heartbeat prior to D&C, which is a far fucking cry, my friend, from “letting some air in,” like her uterus is a dusty parlor that just needs a good airing out for an afternoon before a tea party — commence suction, which is often followed up by scraping out any remaining tissue with a curette and requires a steady hand and a good eye, so I’ll fucking thank you not to tell prospective patients that we just pull the drapes back on their vaginas, bung some atmosphere in, and wait for the fetus to disappear, thank you very fucking much.”
“I –” the man began.
“And fucking of course Anis del Toro tastes like licorice, because it is made from anisette, which is in the goddamn name, it’s right there, Anis del Toro, which is practically the exact same fucking flavor.”
There was silence. The man turned back to his drink.
“Then what will we do afterward?” the girl asked.
“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”
“What makes you think so?”
“That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.”
The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.
“And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.”
“I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.”
“So have I,” said the girl. “And afterward they were all so happy.”
“Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”
“And you really want to?”
“I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.”
“And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?”
“I love you now. You know I love you.”
“I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”
“I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.”
“If I do it you won’t ever worry?”
“I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”
“Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t care about me.”
“Well, I care about you.”
“Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.”
“I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.”
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains that were secretly elephants. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
“And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we could have everything.”
“We can have everything.”
“No, we can’t.”
“We can have the whole world.”
“No, we can’t.”
“We can go everywhere.”
“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.”
“It’s ours.”
“No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”
“But they haven’t taken it away.”
“We’ll wait and see.”
“Come on back in the shade,” he said. “You mustn’t feel that way.”
“I don’t feel any way,” the girl said. “I just know things.”
“I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do ”
“Nor that isn’t good for me,” she said. “I know. Could we have another beer?”
“All right. But you’ve got to realize ”
“I realize,” the girl said. “Can’t we maybe stop talking?”
They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.
“You’ve got to realize,” he said, “that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.”
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.”
“Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.”
“Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.”
“It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.”
“Would you do something for me now?’
“I’d do anything for you.’
“Would you please please please please please please please Stop talking.”
He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.
“But I don’t want you to,” he said, “I don’t care anything about it.”
“I’ll scream,” the girl said.
The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads.
“The train comes in five minutes,” she said.
“What did she say?” asked the girl.
“That the train is coming in five minutes.”
The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” the woman said, “but you have only been here for thirty-five minutes and this is your third beer.”
“Plus there was that Anis del Toro,” the doctor from the next table added.
“Plus there was that Anis del Toro,” the woman said. “So it seems to me that at least some part of you feels pretty ambiguous about this pregnancy. Not that you have to listen to me, of course.”
“Right,” the doctor said. “It’s your choice.”
“I mean, I know it’s the 1930s or whatever, so drinking while pregnant isn’t that big of a thing yet,” the woman said.
“If indeed it ever will be,” the doctor said. “Obviously, we have no way of knowing that, because we are in the 1930s, or whenever exactly this story was written.”
“The general time period notwithstanding,” the woman continued. “I just think you should consider the fact that you had four drinks in a row in about thirty minutes while you’ve been having this conversation. Sounds like maybe there’s a part of you that doesn’t feel ready to see a pregnancy through. It’s just something to consider. But like I said, it’s not really my business.”
“Thank you for the beer,” the girl said, because she didn’t understand Spanish, which is of course the language the woman had been speaking in, as a Spaniard.
“I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,” the man said. She smiled at him.
“All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.”
“I mean, regardless of whether or not she continues with the pregnancy, they both really need to reconsider their drinking habits. Right? I’m not crazy, right?” the woman asked.
“No, absolutely. I’ve been here the same length of time as them and I’m barely on my second drink,” the doctor said.
“I mean, I’m a bartender. I understand what it’s like to enjoy some afternoon drinking. But this is like they’re in a race to see who can exhaust their liver the fastest.”
The man picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.
“Do you feel better?” he asked.
“I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”
But remember those hills from the beginning of the story, and also the middle of it? The hills weren’t like white elephants at all. They WERE elephants. They stampeded the bar. Everyone died.
“Now I’ll never get that abortion,” the girl said, and then she died too, from being stampeded.
Tags: abortion, elephants, ernest hemingway, fan fiction, fixing hemingway, metaphors, stampedes, the art of suspense
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“…requires a steady hand and a good eye, so I’ll fucking thank you not to tell prospective patients that we just pull the drapes back on their vaginas, bung some atmosphere in, and wait for the fetus to disappear, thank you very fucking much.”
I FUCKING DIED.
… And this was why I missed the whole point of the story when I read it in high school. Young as i was, I just couldn’t equate ‘letting the air in’ with the actual, technical details of abortion.
I thought they were maybe talking about pneumothorax, or some other thing dealing with TB, because in those times, they did try to combat TB by ‘letting the air in’ to the pleural cavity.
I also missed the part where the hills were actual white elephants – the thorough stomping-over at the end really does round out the story.
I’m an English teacher, and when this appeared on our calendar and I read it for the first time, I had no idea whatsoever that it was about abortion. I read it and thought, “WTF are they talking about?” and then googled it.
In the book The Cider House Rules there is a passage about how some girls would get just the dilation done on a D&C and then let nature take its course so they’d miscarry. I think it was in reference to how some women ended up looking for the orphanage doctor who also did abortions, because after the dilation things went very wrong sometimes. I think it’s also what the wife in Revolutionary Road was trying to attempt, “letting the air in.”
I read the Hemmingway story for school about a year after reading Cider House Rules, so that combined with the train arriving in 9 minutes (or something combining 9 and the train) made me realize they were talking about an unwanted pregnancy. I got an F on my paper for plagiarizing because my instructor didn’t believe I could have figured that out on my own. I had to prove I had read the John Irving book before she would change my grade.
Agreed. I’m just imagining the wafting it would take to make a fetus pick up its little 30s style suitcase and say “well I never!” and march out of the womb. XD
The more you learn about Hemmingway the more strange and pathetic and sad he is, meanwhile his cohort, Martha Gellhorn WAS basically a real-life action hero. She hitchhiked a TANK into war-time Spain! She was constantly running toward the front! She had an affair with a paratrooper!
This is about a 10,000x improvement on the actual story, which was my first introduction to Hemingway and also my first desire to bang my head repeatedly off my desk in the middle of English class.
Fuck you, Hemingway. Fuck you right in the eye.
This story is on the syllabus for my short story class and I just KNOW we’re going to spend an hour dissecting Hmeingway’s use of the word “white” and I really just want to print this off and bring it into class and slam it down on the professor’s desk while shouting “STOP SUCKING THIS MAN’S LITERARY DICK.”
After the bit with the doctor I skimmed the rest to see if he would stick his head back in to do some more setting straight of the record and I was not disappointed.
Thank you. I have always wanted that guy, whom I now think of as a thirties era Ted, to get stomped to death by elephants.
The man at the table next to them leaned over. The man wore a broad white hat. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing you. I’m a doctor, and that’s not how abortions work at all.”
If this line were added to the original story, EVERYTHING would be fixed.
And now I never need to read any Hemingway ever again, amen.
I’m also feeling a lot of Dave Eggers in this. But maybe the calibration is off on my white-male-author-o-meter.
This is now the third time I have mentioned on this website that the first time I read that story I thought it was about trepanning. It just keeps being relevant.
Letting the air in!
Thank God I wasn’t the only one. Trepanning was the only thing that made sense to me.
This is fucking perfect.
my god, so lovely. And you know what, I don’t hate hemmingway, bless his terrible heart. He’s the most beautiful of the sad white hipster mainsplainers, from a time when there was a real manly beauty in his melancholy. I blame any guy who reads him and thinks, ain’t that the way to live, but hemmingway himself, what a poor stupid teddy bear.
HA this is almost exactly how I feel about him! A poor stupid teddy bear. Perfect.
I just realized Hemingway plus rude reality plus a bit of scorn for insufferable characters, even the ones you’re probably supposed to like, plus a bit of whimsy = Salinger. Or at least, that’s what this sounds like to me.
YES! I was thinking bananafish in some of the dialogue.
Hills Like White Elephants has a warm, golden spot in my heart because analyzing it for a high school English paper was the first time I really dug into critical theory and lit crit articles. I loved it (the decoding, the theory, not necessarily Papa H) and a few years later I became the Absinthe-drinking, Stephen Greenblatt-super-fan, English major I was born to be.
BRB, breaking into every high school English classroom I can find and pasting this into their textbooks.
I’m imagining something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy9-dggE1KM
Only with whiter elephants.
I have a rule to never read Hemingway. So, I didn’t get that this was supposed to be a Hemingway thing until the tags.
I’m certain this is better than whatever Old Leather Liver wrote, though.
I’m gonna briefly stick up for old leather liver. I made a real point to skip him because what a jerk and I hate how people idolize him for writing short sentences, and feminism and also they made us read the Sun Also Rises in sophomore year and then i got stuck in the woods with a copy of a moveable feast, and I don’t know if it’s a product of being older and wiser or just being trapped, but I found it really great and then i read a farewell to arms and also great, but then i was done, and that dragged me into reading gatsby and tender is the night over and I got very different things out of those than I did as a callow youth.
Which isn’t to say he isn’t capital P problematic or whatever, but you get a real sense of how world wars fucked those young people up right nicely and it’s kind of a good lead in. Plus once you read moveable feast and tender is the night you are exactly ready to encounter the Dud Avocado, which is a perfect bubbly sip of champagne. And that’s it. Resume hating hemmingway if you wish.
SIDEBAR WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TALK ABOUT THE DUD AVOCADO WITH ME? THIS IS CLEARLY THE RIGHT SITE.
ELAINE DUNDY IS THE BEST, THE OLD MAN AND ME IS JUST AS GOOD BUT HELL OF DEPRESSING, TALK ABOUT THE DUD AVOCADO IN THE OPEN THREAD TOMORROW AND I WILL BE THERE
I BOUGHT THE OLD MAN AND ME AND I CAN’T GET STARTED BECAUSE ONCE I DO I WON’T HAVE STARTING IT TO LOOK FORWARD TO ANYMORE. I WILL TRY TO OPEN THREAD WORKSHOP THIS WITH YOU TOMORROW, WHAT TIME I AM ON PACIFIC COAST PLEASE ADVISE STOP.
I KNOW, I HAVE AVOIDED GETTING HOLD OF HER OUT OF PRINT STUFF YET FOR THE SAME REASON. I WILL BE AROUND AFTERNOON EAST COAST TIME SO, SAY, AFTER NOONISH YOUR TIME, IF THAT IS HOW TIME ZONES WORK. POSSIBLY A LITTLE EARLIER
This is my first introduction to Hemingway and if it’s anything at all like the original, man could recognize a horrifically awkward conversation when he wrote it.
Scuse me while I go never read any more Hemingway oh god conversations of this exact I DON’T LOVE YOU ANY MORE stripe are the worst.
I want my last words to be “Now I’ll never get that abortion” as well.
I remember some of my friends in college taking an English class where they had to read this and their professor insisting the key word to the whole story was “reasonably”, and then for the rest of college we would just occasionally yell “REASONABLY!!!!” at each other in arguments.
We were nerds.
When we read this in high school, for some reason my teacher took Hemingway’s name off the print-out and had us guess who we thought the author was, whether it was a man or woman, etc, and I hadn’t ever read Hemingway but I knew Of Him and was like, This must be what people are talking about.
And I was right.
I’ve never read any fucking Hemingway and now I don’t need to.
Also. Mallory Ortberg. I read your first paragraph and I thought “Robert Benchley,” and then I read the rest of this and am now mute.
Two of my workstudy students had to read this in class this year and came into my office very upset because they thought the teacher was crazy. They wanted me to read this and tell them what it was about because there was NO WAY it was about what the teacher thought it was. I got a page into the story and was like “so, this is about abortion” and they were shocked because that’s what their teacher said and HOW DID I EVEN COME UP WITH THAT. Apparently they thought it was about breast implants. We had a long discussion about the importance of context after that.
Thank you, Mallory. Thank you.
I thought the letting the air in thing had something to do with the bead curtain the first time I read this and that the thing they kept discussing was having a threesome or something…
Honestly, though, I like this story. I’m not a huge Hemingway fan but this story and Old Man and the Sea were both fun to analyze in school and got my English major blood pumping. Not that I couldn’t get that same feeling from something written by a non-straight-white-guy, but I definitely didn’t hate this as much as people peeing their pants over how much they love Thoreau. That shit gets me angry. Like really, he was not the savior of the human race. He was a straight white guy that went to Harvard and then lived with Emerson and read all his books and ate his food and stuff and wrote a book saying “Wow I’m surviving in nature all by myself guys. You should all do this. Commune with nature. Forget societal expectations.” I’m like, yeah, I’ll just pass that on to all the slaves and wives and stuff who are just getting bogged down in industrial life and need to go live on a pond at the invitation of their rich friend…
THIS IS PERFECT
What the fuck did I just read I want more.