Character Analysis
Name AKAs: The Hotel-Keeper
We like to imagine the padrone looking something like George Clooney: mature, handsome, and very dapper. Even though the story is told mostly in the third person, we certainly get to hear a lot about how the wife feels about this guy, with little bits about how "she liked the way he wanted to serve her" and "she liked the way he felt about being a hotel keeper." Not so fast Mrs. Wife—how are you so sure he feels this way towards you? Nothing personal, but maybe he's just doing his job.
If you ask us, we'd say these thoughts are just projections of her own desires. Hemingway could have chosen to tell us that the padrone genuinely wants to serve her and really likes being a hotelkeeper, but he doesn't do that. We never hear what the padrone thinks of the wife, at least not from his own point of view. Instead, by putting these thoughts and judgments in the wife's mind, he's reminding us of the intense and basic reason why the wife likes him: he makes her feel a certain way about herself—respected, cared for, "important." The fact we never hear what the padrone is actually thinking serves as a reminder of how focused the story's perspective is on the wife's experience.
So, understanding that everything we know about the padrone is from the wife's perspective, we should turn our attention the very interesting and very physical responses she has to him:
Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance (24).
"Small and tight inside"? This phrase is two things: physical and vague. It sounds like the wife is experiencing a sort of primal, nameless desire—a far cry from the very articulate statements of the things the wife "likes" about the padrone. Could she be having a sexual reaction to the padrone?
In some ways, it seems like the padrone is a kind of symbol of masculinity—or perhaps he is just more masculine than the woman's husband. Hemingway's emphasis on the largeness of the man and the way he makes the wife feel "small inside" makes us think her reaction is in some way related to the padrone's masculinity. He, being so masculine, makes her feel feminine—something that comes to bear just a few minutes later as the wife tells her husband how she "gets so tired of looking like a boy" (35). Uh-oh—looks like there might be trouble in paradise for this mismatched twosome.