“Americans always say it to you before they go away,” an essay on Across the River and into the Trees by David Gagne.
“You’re also very beautiful and lovely and I love you.”
“You always say that and I don’t know what it means but I like to hear it.”
“How old are you now?”
“Nearly nineteen. Why?”
“And you don’t know what it means?”
“No. Why should I? Americans always say it to you before they go away. It seems to be necessary to them. But I love you very much, too, whatever that is.”
In Across the River and into the Trees, the Colonel and Renata are lovers. Colonel Cantwell is fifty and Renata is nineteen. In class we talked about how he “can’t well” and how the two “speak” sexually while riding in the gondola. I don’t think they are merely speaking sexually, but that Hemingway used their conversation to imply they actually were having sex. If you read the conversation they have it can easily be seen as a sexual episode. I don’t think the sexual part of their relationship was a problem for the pair. I don’t think the colonel was incapable of having sex, but just incapable of having a mature relationship.
This quote is an example of his difficulty in communicating and her inability to comprehend what he tells her. He knows that she is nineteen and doesn’t need to ask her, just as she knows what love is. I think Renata really does love Cantwell but is unable to accept it because she knows their relationship can’t last. Like Maria and Robert Jordan, she knows their time together is finite and she has no control over it and so she refuses to give herself completely to Cantwell. She gives him other things, to be sure – the emeralds, the painting – but she will not allow him to speak of love lightly.
Why does she say that Americans always say they love her? Is it because she has had many American lovers? This question came to me when I read this line originally. I think it is possible that the Colonel is not her only lover and this is why she says things like this. But I think also that she does honestly love him, more than she loves any other American lovers she may or may not have. I think that he loves her definitely, not so much because of her youth, but more in spite of it. But he can’t effectively face the fact that she is only nineteen and is innocent of all the experiences he has had. Though he tells her stories throughout the book to try and give her some sort of knowledge of the realm of experience, eventually though he must realize that she and he will never truly be together.
Hemingway here is making another comment on the problems of people from disparate backgrounds communicating well. Renata and Cantwell repeatedly have this inability to understand each other when they are talking about “the word love.” (Renata’s refusal to allow it to become more than just “a word” is evident in her many referrals to it as such and not as an emotion or feeling.) Like “the word Cohn,” Hemingway takes a word and, by treating it as a word and not an article of communication, makes it incomprehensible to one of his characters. Renata’s view of the rote repetition of the word, by “always,” further serves to disassociate the word from its meaning.
