Having finally introduced his entire ensemble cast, Hemingway begins here to use it to its fullest effect, like a chess master moving pieces around a board. Brett rejects Cohn outright. Having been trusted by his mentor Montoya to look out for Romero, Jake betrays the former by first introducing the young matador to his decadent friends, and then actually fixing him up with the plainly-destructive Brett. Brett has hurt Mike, Cohn, and Jake himself; it’s hard to imagine that she won’t harm the younger and far more naïve Romero. Meanwhile, Mike cannot get past the fact that his fiancée slept with Cohn, and tensions between the two men mount.
As late in the story as we are at this point, characterization nevertheless continues. Jake tells Brett that he’d behave just as badly as Cohn, if given the opportunity, to which Brett replies, “Darling, don’t let’s talk a lot of rot.” Again, Cohn’s primary function in this book is to serve as Jake’s foil—to make him look good, really. His behavior in this chapter certainly accomplishes that.
Look closely at the start of this chapter for yet another example of the famous and influential Hemingway style. Stylistically, at least, Hemingway never wrote better than during the descriptive passages in this early novel. With regard to his dramatic writing, the scene in which Montoya observes Romero with the drunken English and Americans is also practically peerless. Though he never says a word, it is clear to us precisely what Montero is thinking.
And, of course, the cruel phallic joking continues. “Tell him that bulls have no balls,” a drunken Mike shouts. Later, a fireworks technician’s fruitless attempts at pyrotechnics are clearly metaphoric: He tries to launch a series of balloons, but
[t]he wind brought them all down, and Don Manuel Orquito’s face was sweaty in the light of his complicated fireworks that fell into the crowd and charged and chased, sputtering and cracking, between the legs of the people.
“I say, I wish one would go up,” Brett remarks. Hemingway never ceases reminding us of Jake’s terrible condition.
