Hemingway's Operative Report

The other day I took a book with me into the OR to read between cases. It was a book of Hemingway's comments on writing. There were frequent comparisons to lovemaking and war and good clarets and lots of gutsy existentialism. Then I thought about the mindless writing of medical documents and wondered how Papa would have dictated an appendectomy.


HEMINGWAY'S OPERATIVE REPORT


The steel went out of her eyes as they ran the juice into her. Steel. It was a man's metal, not like zinc or molybdenum. Her sleep came on like the dreamless fog of a good claret. I grasped the knife, the dog of a knife, and cut into her. Was it her skin or mine that I cut? Did it really matter? Layers were divided. We are nothing but layers, and when the last layer is gone there is nothing. Yes, there was blood. There is always blood. Her blood reminded me of a certain vineyard in the Alsace, where the blood of battle could not be separated from the blood of the grapes and all was the harvest of cannon and madness. They said the bottling that year was the purest vintage anyone could remember. It was like drinking the tears of the Madonna, they said, and it brought on both joy and sadness, though none would touch it and the bottles cried in their caves degustation till they ran to vinegar. With my finger curled in the shape of a milk white thigh, like the thigh of a certain girl, no she was a woman, but she fooled all the pining lads in the village, who would have died for her for less than a kiss, but she had no desire to harvest the lives of fools, for she was a woman even at that age, I brought the diseased old man, whose name means less than nothing, into the light that was no longer dark. One tie and a purse string, made of moth's vomit, were all it took to bring him down. He did not beg, for he was one who had lived and he had no fear of death. Death to him was like the swirl of a good Pernod sweating down the side of Alsatian crystal on a night when Hatchet Jim came back with a fresh load of Cubanos and the table stakes occasionally contained a woman's name. We parted friends and that is the best way and maybe the only way, since any other parting is not that at all. With the final layer closed, the soft, sad one that hides everything and yet speaks every language known to man, I stood, or did I sit, and with the urge that was obsession only to myself, I began to write, for writing, as lovemaking, can truly begin only when there is nothing left to say.