Montoya

Montoya treats Jake as a rare insider, greeting him with a handshake reserved exclusively for true aficionados and sharing private concerns about Pedro Romero's development. This bond of mutual trust collapses when Jake introduces Brett Ashley to Romero: Montoya responds by silently withdrawing all warmth and refusing to acknowledge Jake further. Their falling-out starkly illustrates Jake's moral failure in Pamplona.

The handshake Montoya extends to Jake upon his arrival at the Hotel Montoya serves as an initiation rite, marking Jake as a member of a small brotherhood of genuine bullfighting enthusiasts. Hemingway clearly indicates that this gesture is withheld from ordinary tourists and superficial admirers. Its significance is confirmed in reverse when Montoya entirely cancels it after Jake facilitates Brett's introduction to Romero.

Montoya stops acknowledging Jake after Jake introduces Brett Ashley to Pedro Romero, directly enabling the affair that jeopardizes Romero's focus and integrity. Montoya had explicitly worked to keep Romero insulated from corrupting social influences, and Jake's action betrays the insider trust Montoya had extended. The rebuke occurs entirely through silence and absence rather than confrontation.

Afición is a genuine, selfless love of bullfighting untouched by fashion, profit, or social spectacle. For Montoya, it serves almost as a spiritual concept that differentiates authentic participants in the corrida from careless outsiders. He cares about it because he sees it as fragile—what makes a fighter like Romero truly great can be corrupted by the money and boredom of the expatriate world he seeks to protect.

Montoya has deliberately kept Romero away from wealthy tourists, foreign admirers, and the superficial social circles of expatriates, seeing the young matador's purity of technique and dedication as something that must be sheltered. His protectiveness is almost paternal—he oversees Romero's development and even consults Jake about whether to allow an introduction to influential outsiders, revealing how carefully he polices the fighter's world.

No—Montoya never argues, accuses, or creates a scene. He communicates his moral judgment entirely through withdrawal: he simply stops greeting Jake, canceling the handshake and warmth that had signified insider belonging. Brett notably never has a direct scene with Montoya; she exists in his world as a category of threat rather than a person he engages. Hemingway uses this restraint to make Montoya's disapproval more final.

Montoya serves as the novel's moral gatekeeper, embodying afición as an ethical framework against which the expatriates' rootless, performative lives are measured and found wanting. His hotel is a space of genuine belonging, and losing access to it reflects Jake's own compromised integrity. By delivering his judgment in silence and gesture rather than speech, Montoya also exemplifies the Hemingway code of meaning expressed through action rather than words.

Montoya is a minor character in terms of page time but carries major thematic weight. He appears primarily in the Pamplona sections of Book II, and Hemingway provides him no extended speeches. Yet his gestures—the handshake, the shared photographs of bullfighters, the silent withdrawal—carry enormous moral significance, making him one of the novel's most economical and effective figures despite his limited presence.