This week is the running of the bulls in Pamplona, the Festival de San Fermin. I went in the mid ‘80s, travelling through Spain and France, hitting as many towns and events as possible that made up the geography and events of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I have slides that I began scanning a few months ago but have not completed, so I will post the few I have here and look to maybe scanning more tonight.
We arrived in Pamplona to find that the rooms we thought we had reserved were gone, so we ended up staying in a dormitory at a local college. We bought shirts and scarves and wine bags and joined the throng of revelers in the city. People were camped in every available space, but most people stayed up all night drinking and dancing. It was like a marathon for most seeing how long they could continue without sleep. We went to the pen where the bulls for the next morning’s running were kept, six steers and six bulls. They looked intimidating enough. We would run the approximate mile down the slippery cobbled Roman streets and hope to get into the arena with the bulls.
The next morning we met at a bar where Hemingway drank before the running. There were thousands of people gathered both on the streets and behind the barriers that separated the non-runners from the bulls. All was raucous until the rockets went up and the bulls were released. Then there was a flurry of activity as people tried to climb the barriers only to be shoved back into the streets by the laughing crowd. The first part of the run is uphill, and we could see the crowd thinning and as the bulls charged ahead. The first glimpse of their horns brought me to a realization. What was I doing here, I wondered? Did I think I could outrun a bull for a mile?
Suddenly, they were upon us and we were running. The object was to hit a bull on the nose with the morning’s newspaper. All about, people were falling to the ground. Had so many slipped, I wondered, or were they tripped. But in most cases, it was neither. It was more a case of nerves, a half-fainting, legs weakened by fear simply collapsed, and therein lay the danger as you ran, keeping one eye behind you on the bulls and the other ahead of you on the battlefield of fallen celebrants.
You could not believe the size of the bulls as you ran before, beside, and then behind them. I managed to hit a steer on his rump.
But we made it into the arena which was filled to capacity with revelers. And of that, I will write tomorrow.
I must confess a perversity that when watching the festivities I always root for the bulls. Of course, as with all festivities rooted in antiquity there is a “spiritual” aspect of this in the vein of Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty.” Thus the running of the bulls contains the religious theatre of Bronze Age bull leaping. I congratulate you on your nearly getting speared or steered and do not hold as a classical professor once told me that only Cretins leap bulls.
ReplyDeleteWell, he said something like that.