Critics have argued cogently that the bamboo curtain that hangs across the doorway in the station bar where Jig and her American lover sit is a a symbolic barrier between them. But most critics have tended to associate the curtain primarily with Jig, identifying it as strings of rosary beads symbolizing her Catholicism (Elliot, 23), or playthings symbolizing her desire to bear her child (Organ, 11). I suggest that Hemingway also associates the curtain with the American and the emotionally counterfeit and barren life that he wishes to continue leading. For the curtain is not only made of hollow bamboo, as David Gilmour points out (48-49), a hollowness suggestive of the barren world the man desires; but the curtain literally demarcates the artificial, comfortable world of the bar, with which the man is familiar, from the often uncomforable and unpredictable real world of nature, love, and birth that Jig desires.
The curtained world of the bar is akin to Plato's cave, for its inhabitants experience shows rather than the reality symbolized by the blazing Spanish sun. The curtain protects the bar's inhabitants from such real-world annoyances as flies, while the drink it advertises shields them from reality with an artificial haze of alcohol. The curtain not only marks the entrance to the bar, it advertises "Anis del Toro," a drink that is an imitation of the forbidden absinthe. Hence the curtain, itself an advertisement for the drink, is what Plato would call a "copy of a copy," thrice removed from reality. Because Jig has been dwelling in the man's world, she recognizes that the licorice- flavored anis, a bitterly disappointing and commonplace substitute for absinthe, is a metonym for all the other counterfeit replacements for the real things for which she has long been waiting. When the waitress states that they must exchange four "reales" for their drinks, the implied pun on "real" suggests that the exchange is one of "reality" for phoniness.
When the wind blows the curtain against the table, the man takes his cue to deploy his counterfeit reasoning, arguing that the abortion is "perfectly natural" and indeed not really an operation. Jig responds by grasping the curtain, symbolically clutching the man and his world, assenting to the abortion only because she does not care about herself. But in a dramatic peripeteia, she forsakes the curtain, rises and walks away from the man. Facing the real world she so desires, rather than the man's curtained cave, she asserts that they have lost e verything real. The man, unable to see beyond the shadows of his curtained world, thinks that to "have everything" means being free to continue travelling from bar to bar, a life that necessitates the abortion of their child. Perceiving his lack of comprehension, Jig dismisses his entreaties for the abortion, as hollow as the bamboo beads of the curtain. The jig is up, and she sees that in his eyes she, as well as her unborn child, has become a "white elephant." When she demands that he "Please stop talking," he promptly retreats into his curtained world, drinking a second Anis among the other "reasonable" people in the shaded bar. And thiough he rejoins Jig, he has not truly left his counterfeit world, and its curtain reinains between them.
Gary Elliot, 1977. Explicator 35: 23
Dennis Organ, 1979. Explicator 37: 11.
David Gilmour 1983, Explicator 41: 48-49),